What the Wind Knows
What the Wind Knows is Amy Harmon's 2019 historical romance, set against the Irish War of Independence and the brief, brutal civil war that followed. Anne Gallagher is a thirty-something New York novelist raised by her Irish-born grandfather, whose dying request is that his ashes be scattered on Lough Gill in County Leitrim. When Anne rents a small boat and rows out to honor him, a sudden fog lifts to reveal a different shore: the same lake in 1921, in the middle of a guerrilla war against the British Crown. She is mistaken for Anne Finnegan Gallagher, the long-presumed-dead mother of a small boy named Eoin and the wife of a country doctor named Thomas Smith. Harmon weaves Anne's growing relationship with Thomas, her uneasy understanding of the timeline she is living through, and the appearances of historical figures including Michael Collins and Éamon de Valera into a slow-paced, deeply romantic novel about loss, return, and the blurred line between memory and prophecy.
Where What the Wind Knows keeps showing up
Two of our editors' lists feature this novel.
What you might want to know about What the Wind Knows
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
American writer Anne Gallagher takes her grandfather's ashes home to Lough Gill in County Leitrim, Ireland, rows a small boat onto the lake at dawn, and wakes up in 1921 in the arms of country doctor Thomas Smith. Thomas thinks Anne is his cousin's missing wife and the mother of the boy on the dock.
Amy Harmon researched the Irish War of Independence carefully, and Michael Collins appears as a real historical figure. The time-travel romance plot is fiction.
It has a few intimate scenes that are detailed but not extended. It sits in the soft-spice range typical of Amy Harmon's work.
It has a few intimate scenes that are detailed but not extended. It sits in the soft-spice range typical of Amy Harmon's work.
What the Wind Knows was written by Amy Harmon by Lake Union Publishing.
What the Wind Knows is 416 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, What the Wind Knows takes most readers 6 to 9 hours to finish.
What the Wind Knows is a standalone novel by Amy Harmon, not part of a series.
What the Wind Knows is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
