This week, we’re counting down to the September 3 release of Jane Porter‘s newest installment in the Brennan Sisters Series, The Good Wife! Sarah Brennan, the youngest and considered the most beautiful of the Brennan sisters, is married to professional baseball player, Boone Walker. As Boone travels year-round with his team, Sarah stays home and cares for their two young children—but not without thoughts of Boone’s infidelity coming back to haunt her. Sarah remains deeply in love with Boone, but with yet another career change and more tension than ever between the two, will Sarah decide enough is enough or will she fight for their marriage.

While writing the Brennan sisters series, Jane was inspired by great Irish novelists and stories of Irish-Americans. Here are her five picks in honor of the Brennan sisters:

Light a Penny Candle by Maeve Binchy

Writing with warmth, wit and great compassion, Maeve Binchy tells a magnificent story of the lives and loves of two women, bound together in a friendship that nothing could tear asunder – not even the man who threatened to come between them forever.

Watermelon by Marian Keyes

The first in the Walsh Family series, at twenty-nine, fun-loving, good-natured Claire has everything she ever wanted: a husband she adores, a great apartment, a good job. When her husband tells Claire he’s leaving her, Claire retreats back to her family’s home in Dublin, only to find more than she bargained for.

Rachel’s Holiday by Marian Keyes

 When her loving family hustles her back home and checks her into Ireland’s answer to the Betty Ford Clinic, Rachel is hopeful. Perhaps it will be lovely–instead, she finds a lot of group therapy, which leads her, against her will, to some important self-knowledge. She also finds something that all women like herself fear: a man who might actually be good for her.

Memories of a Catholic Girlhood by Mary McCarthy

This unique autobiography begins with McCarthy’s recollections of an indulgent, idyllic childhood tragically altered by the death of her parents in the influenza epidemic of 1918. Tempering the need to fictionalize for the sake of a good story with the need for honesty, she creates interchapters that tell the reader what she has inferred or invented.

Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt

So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Despite extreme poverty and desperation of his childhood McCourt recounts his early age in an affecting and uplifting voice in this luminous memoir.

Pinterest PS – Check out this Brennan sisters-inspired Pinterest board!