The Emerald Isle has no shortage of cultural touchpoints—from foam-topped pints of Guinness to the poetry of Yeats, raucous St. Patrick's Day festivities to the music of U2 and Hozier. Ireland has long been understood as a welcoming people and a popular destination. War, famine, and religious struggles have also plagued the country, however, resulting in a partitioned Ireland and a struggling national identity.

In The Shortest History of Ireland, James Hawes crafts a comprehensive and captivating account of Ireland's national story. He shows us that thanks to a unique culture rooted in millennia of continuity, Ireland has always been able to assimilate would-be invaders, and reveals how the Irish, ever since the roaming saints and scholars of the early Middle Ages, have helped to shape Europe and America.

Though Irish history is often seen as a mere catalog of colonial repression, Hawes reaches beyond the clichés and the assumptions to tell a dramatic new story, backed up by the latest scholarship. Steering listeners through medieval kingdoms and bloody invasions, disastrous famines and the age of empire, and finally to ongoing tensions of nationhood and independence, Hawes argues that, with its natural wealth, its extraordinary magnetism, and its exiled children across the globe, the island only needs to sidestep the last detritus of the British Empire for its turbulent past to flow into a bright future.

This is popular history at its best—a timeless drama of freedom and persecution, riot and revolution, empire and independence.