Irish Hearts

About the Irish Hearts series

Irish Hearts is a loosely connected set of three standalone contemporary romances unified by Irish settings and horse country rather than a shared family or storyline. Irish Thoroughbred, published in 1981, was Nora Roberts's debut novel: it follows Adelia Cunnane, a strong-willed young Irish immigrant who arrives at her American cousin's Maryland horse farm and clashes with its owner, Travis Grant, before falling for him. Irish Rose, published seven years later, moves to Ireland itself, pairing a woman fighting to keep her family's land with the man who complicates her plans. Irish Rebel, published over a decade after that, returns to the Maryland horse-racing world of the first book with a new generation of characters navigating both the track and their own stubborn attraction to each other.

Because the three novels span nearly twenty years of Roberts's career and were never conceived as a planned trilogy, they're grouped together retrospectively by publishers and retailers under the "Irish Hearts" or "Irish" banner mainly for their shared Irish-heritage and horse-country themes, distinct from Roberts's later, fully continuous Irish-set trilogies like Born In and Cousins O'Dwyer.

How to read this series

The three Irish Hearts novels — Irish Thoroughbred, Irish Rose, Irish Rebel — can be read in any order, since they share no continuing characters or plot, only Irish settings and themes. Irish Thoroughbred holds particular interest as Nora Roberts's very first published novel, so readers curious about where her career began often start there regardless of series order.