Ann Hanigan Kotz

In 1840, Mary and Peter Healy flee Ireland’s County Sligo with little more than their seven children and a single fierce hope—freedom from poverty and English oppression and a chance to own their own land. Across icy seas, they begin their new life in Toronto where they weave themselves into the fabric of the relocated. Unhappy with their industrial city life, the couple buy land, moving the family to Shefford. Their dreams are once again ruled by the English. The Healys’ only chance of escaping prejudice and owning a farm lies in America. Moving south to Cincinnati then west through Illinois and into Iowa, they discover their farm costs them more than comfort. Each new plan for a better life exacts a terrible toll until their dream is built on the absence of those they love most.

In 1846, amidst the famine in County Limerick, Ronan and Brighid Murphy, along with their young daughter Aisling, flee hunger, determined to start again. Ronan finds work in America, digging the Illinois-Michigan Canal; and Brighid follows with Aisling, stopping first in the slums of New York. A terrible fire propels her onward, seeking Ronan in Illinois for protection and support, but her life is shattered by accident and abandonment. Widowed and vulnerable, Brighid must marry Michael Shea to survive, but tragedy reduces their household to a single member who must find her way in the world. Assuming a new name among the German settlers of eastern Iowa, Aisling loses her Irish connection, her family history, and her sense of belonging.

In Dubuque, the two bloodlines converge, each carrying what the other has lost: a missing child, a reclaimed identity, a fragile chance at home. Land of Heart’s Desire follows these intertwined journeys—raw with grief, stubborn with hope—as two families fight to give their children a life they never had.

Ann Hanigan Kotz reimagines her own family’s passage across oceans and continents, asking what a home costs and what heritage is worth when survival demands reinvention.

A sweeping, tender novel of exile and endurance, Land of Heart’s Desire brings to life the sacrifices, small mercies, and persistent courage of the Irish immigrants who remade themselves in a new world.

Floyd Olson, the youngest son of Norwegian immigrant and western Iowa settler Karoline Olsen, dreams of a life of adventure flying aeroplanes, riding motorcycles, and playing poker. Instead, circumstances shoulder the young man with responsibilities of a husband and father. To support his new family, Floyd first works in the muck and grime of corn fields and cattle on the farm with his brother, Tingvald. Later, with the help of his favorite brother, Alex, he finds more suitable work at the bank in Denison. But “the itch” to gamble never quite leaves him.

Though he promises his new bride he will put his poker playing behind him, Floyd dips a toe back into his old life and soon dives in head-first, pursuing larger games, the stakes growing ever higher. Aching to battle with the monied men, Floyd finds himself in Sioux City at a table owned by the mob, where he meets a dangerous woman who could ultimately yank him from his family simply by giving him exactly what he wants.

The final novel in Ann Hanigan Kotz’s Olson series, Wayward Son is the story of a man gone wrong—a tale of selfishness and unfulfilled desire, of choosing pleasure over obligation, and giving in to the kind of temptation that comes at the cost of life and freedom.

By the light of the moon, hidden in the rolling hills of 1923 Carroll County, Iowa, illegal whiskey flows from homemade stills. Defying Prohibition, farmers-turned-entrepreneurs turn their hog houses, barns, and basements into moonshine operations to feed their families and save their land while dodging the ever-present federal regulators led by Alvin Truly, the newly deputized agent for the northern district. To stay ahead of the law, the distillers band together into a syndicate, led by a kingpin unknown to all but one man. The anonymous bootleg king builds an empire of whiskey with thousands of gallons of moonshine flowing across Iowa’s borders while conjuring bigger and better ways to get their product across state lines—some going to the famous Chicago mobster—before federal agents can discover their schemes. Agent Truly, however, has his own plots to trap the bootleggers and bring them to justice. Federals against farmers, Wets against Drys, Protestants against Catholics, Moonshine by Moonlight weaves together a fictional story of the bootlegging era while representing the authentic legacy of Carroll County’s underground whiskey industry during one of the most raucous periods of American history.

Ann Hanigan Kotz’s third novel exposes the power struggle between the law and the lawless and once again brings readers to Iowa’s past.

With her husband freshly buried, Karoline Olsen now shoulders the twin burdens of raising her large brood of children, including the one she carries in her belly, and managing a difficult farm life by herself in the Loess Hills. Spanning 1905 to 1933, the second installment of the Olsen series brings major world events—WWI, the Spanish flu, prohibition, suffrage, and the Great Depression—to Iowa, impacting the lives of the Soldier inhabitants, including the Olsens.  

Karoline struggles to keep her children safe and close to their Norwegian roots in the face of pressure to remarry again. She can only watch as one by one her adult children are forced to endure the difficult choices in life, love, marriage, and business, leaving each of them with scars that may never heal. The Lunatic, the Gambler, the Whore, the Teacher, the Entrepreneur, and the Farmer are all titles affixed to these once-innocent children of Kristoffer and Karoline Olsen.

A continuing chronicle of the Olsen family’s survival, Sons and Daughters is the tale of a widowed woman fighting to preserve a legacy, carve her own path in the midst of tragedy and historic hardship, and guide six first-generation American children who are discovering their own identities in a rapidly changing world.

Ann Hanigan Kotz’s second novel of love, loss, violence, and identity once again connects her own family’s ancestors with a vision from the past.

When her husband, Kristoffer, dies from a burst appendix in Iowa in 1905, middle-aged Karoline Olsen, mother of six, must make the 145-mile trip from Cedar Falls to Soldier by horse-drawn wagon to bring his body home. With the corpse on fast-melting ice, Karoline struggles to make good time across the rolling prairie during an exceptionally hot summer, recalling the story of their rocky marriage that brought them from Norway to the New World. The young couple, ambitious and naïve, arrive in the United States in 1884 with hopes of establishing a farm among other Norwegian immigrants, but are met instead with a constant battle against disease, famine, and poverty. A chronicle of the Olsens’ fight to survive in the undeveloped Midwest, to preserve tradition in a new context, and to protect their family from the ravages of pioneer living, The Journey of Karoline Olsen is the tale of a woman and a wife building the American Dream out of nothing but the dirt on which she stands.

Ann Hanigan Kotz’s debut novel of love, loss, and heartache is based on her own family’s heritage, traced back to its roots and re-imagined through a fiction akin to Faulkner.

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