Bonus Track: Excerpts from The Hunger by Donnacha Dennehy

Published: Sept. 9, 2014, 4 a.m.

b'In 1844, Asenath Nicholson, a school teacher, reformer and proprietor of an all-vegetarian boarding house in New York City, travelled\\xa0to Ireland to "personally investigate the condition of the Irish poor." Upon her arrival, she saw the beginnings of the Great Famine, a seven-year period of mass starvation and disease\\xa0in which it is estimated over one million people died and a million more emigrated from Ireland. Nicholson\'s writings and first-hand observations from the time are stitched\\xa0together to form the narrative backdrop of The Hunger, a multi-media\\xa0opera by\\xa0Donnacha Dennehy.'