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Laura de Barra is quite simply a Gaff Goddess. Expanding on her popular online home hacks, Laura will teach you how to handle the problems we all encounter in our homes. Straight-talking and hilarious and packed with Laura's stunning illustrations, her step-by-step guides will prepare you to handle the most common household emergencies with style. From dripping taps to hanging a frame, how best to look after your white goods, how to treat moths, mould and everything in between, and with invaluable design ideas to improve the living spaces in your home, this book is for everyone who has ever wanted to tackle a bit of She-IY without really knowing how. Ingenious and sure to be an instant household must-have, Gaff Goddess will empower you to make those repairs and rediscover your space saving you time, money and stress in the process. ISBN 9781848272620 -
Is it possible to be young, progressive and a Catholic? Ellen Coyne is about to find out ... 'You know, this isn't a Catholic country anymore,' someone proudly declared in a Dublin pub where Ellen Coyne was celebrating the repeal of the Eighth Amendment. About to turn 30, like many her age, Ellen had left the Church a long time ago, but she had never stopped believing in and talking to God. Now, she suddenly realised she wasn't quite ready for this statement to be true, however much of a contradiction it seemed to present with some of her most strongly held views. Abandoning the Church had been an act of protest, a form of punishment. However, she began to wonder: who had really lost the most? Why should those who did the damage to the Church get to keep it and all its good bits, like going to Mass for the ritual and the community, having a clear guide for living a better life, and the comfort of believing it's not the end when somebody dies?But how could she ally herself to an institution she doesn't entirely agree with? In her first book, Ellen tries to figure out how much she really wants to go back to the Church, and if it is even the right thing to do. A stunningly intelligent and thoughtful debut work of non-fiction. ISBN 9780717188949 -
A remarkable first collection by an important new poet. In this collection, Seán Hewitt gives us poems of a rare musicality and grace. By turns searing and meditative, these are lyrics concerned with the matter of the world, its physicality, but also attuned to the proximity of each moment, each thing, to the spiritual. Here, there is sex, grief, and loss, but also a committed dedication to life, hope and renewal. Drawing on the religious, the sacred and the profane, this is a collection in which men meet in the woods, where matter is corrupted and remade. There are prayers, hymns, vespers, incantations, and longer poems which attempt to propel themselves towards the transcendent. In this book, there is always the sense of fragility allied with strength, a violence harnessed and unleashed. The collection ends with a series of elegies for the poet's father: in the face of despair, we are met with a fierce brightness, and a reclamation of the spiritual. 'This is when / we make God, and speak in his voice.'Paying close attention to altered states and the consolations and strangeness of the natural world, this is the first book from a major poet. *SHORTLISTED for Dalkey Literary Awards Emerging Writer of the Year 2021* ISBN 9781787332263 -
A thrilling Cold War story about a KGB double agent, by one of Britain's greatest historians - now with a new afterwordOn a warm July evening in 1985, a middle-aged man stood on the pavement of a busy avenue in the heart of Moscow, holding a plastic carrier bag. In his grey suit and tie, he looked like any other Soviet citizen. The bag alone was mildly conspicuous, printed with the red logo of Safeway, the British supermarket. The man was a spy. A senior KGB officer, for more than a decade he had supplied his British spymasters with a stream of priceless secrets from deep within the Soviet intelligence machine. No spy had done more to damage the KGB. The Safeway bag was a signal: to activate his escape plan to be smuggled out of Soviet Russia. So began one of the boldest and most extraordinary episodes in the history of spying. Ben Macintyre reveals a tale of espionage, betrayal and raw courage that changed the course of the Cold War forever... ISBN 9780241972137 -
*Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2020* *Winner of non-fiction book of the year at the Irish Book Awards* -'Utterly magnificent. Raw, thought-provoking and galvanising; this is a book every woman should read.'Eimear McBride. I have come to think of all the metal in my body as artificial stars, glistening beneath the skin, a constellation of old and new metal. A map, a tracing of connections and a guide to looking at things from different angles. How do you tell the story of a life in a body, as it goes through sickness, health, motherhood? How do you tell that story when you are not just a woman but a woman in Ireland? In the powerful and daring essays in Constellations Sinead Gleeson does that very thing. All of life is within these pages, from birth to first love, pregnancy to motherhood, terrifying sickness, old age and loss to death itself. Throughout this wide-ranging collection she also turns her restless eye outwards delving into work, art and our very ways of seeing. In the tradition of some of our finest life writers, and yet still in her own spirited, generous voice, Sinead takes us on a journey that is both uniquely personal and yet universal in its resonance. Here is the fierce joy and pain of being alive. 'Breathtaking and sublime.' - Nina Stibbe. 'Absolutely extraordinary and life-enhancing.' - Daisy Buchanan, author of How to be Grown-up. ISBN 9781509892778 -
One night in December 1972, Jean McConville, a mother of ten, was abducted from her home in Belfast and never seen alive again. Her disappearance would haunt her orphaned children, the perpetrators of the brutal crime and a whole society in Northern Ireland for decades. Through the unsolved case of Jean McConville's abduction, Patrick Radden Keefe tells the larger story of the Troubles, investigating Dolours Price, the first woman to join the IRA, who bombed the Old Bailey; Gerry Adams, the politician who helped end the fighting but denied his IRA past; and Brendan Hughes, an IRA commander who broke their code of silence. A gripping story forensically reported, Say Nothing explores the extremes people will go to for an ideal, and the way societies mend - or don't - after long and bloody conflict. ISBN 9780008159269 -
The first volume in Tim Robinson's phenomenal Connemara Trilogy - which Robert Macfarlane has called 'One of the most remarkable non-fiction projects undertaken in English'. In its landscape, history and folklore, Connemara is a singular region: ill-defined geographically, and yet unmistakably a place apart from the rest of Ireland. Tim Robinson, who established himself as Ireland's most brilliant living non-fiction writer with the two-volume Stones of Aran, moved from Aran to Connemara nearly twenty years ago. This book is the result of his extraordinary engagement with the mountains, bogs and shorelines of the region, and with its folklore and its often terrible history: a work as beautiful and surprising as the place it attempts to describe. ISBN 9781844880669 -
When Layla Saad began an Instagram challenge called #MeAndWhiteSupremacy, she never predicted it would spread as widely as it did. She encouraged people to own up and share their racist behaviors, big and small. She was looking for truth, and she got it. Thousands of people participated in the challenge, and over 90,000 people downloaded the Me and White Supremacy Workbook. The updated and expanded Me and White Supremacy takes the work deeper by adding more historical and cultural contexts, sharing moving stories and anecdotes, and including expanded definitions, examples, and further resources. Awareness leads to action, and action leads to change. The numbers show that readers are ready to do this work - let's give it to them. Me and White Supremacy teaches readers how to dismantle the privilege within themselves so that they can stop (often unconsciously) inflicting damage on people of colour, and in turn, help other white people do better, too. ISBN 9781529405118 -
A glimpse into the process of one Ireland's best writers, handiwork is Baume's non-fiction debut, written with the keen eye for nature and beauty as well as the extraordinary versatilitySara Baume's fans have come to expect. PUBLISHED 26TH MARCH 2020. ISBN 9781916434257 -
In her new book, Invisible Women, award-winning campaigner and writer Caroline Criado Perez shows us how, in a world largely built for and by men, we are systematically ignoring half the population. She exposes the gender data gap - a gap in our knowledge that is at the root of perpetual, systemic discrimination against women, and that has created a pervasive but invisible bias with a profound effect on women's lives. Caroline brings together for the first time an impressive range of case studies, stories and new research from across the world that illustrate the hidden ways in which women are excluded from the very building blocks of the world we live in, and the impact this has on their health and wellbeing. From government policy and medical research, to technology, workplaces, urban planning and the media - Invisible Women exposes the biased data that excludes women. In making the case for change, this powerful and provocative book will make you see the world anew. ISBN 9781784706289 -
As Governor of Galicia, SS Brigadesfuhrer Otto Freiherr von Wachter presided over an authority on whose territory hundreds of thousands of Jews and Poles were killed, including the family of the author's grandfather. By the time the war ended in May 1945, he was indicted for 'mass murder'. Hunted by the Soviets, the Americans, the Poles and the British, as well as groups of Jews, Wachter went on the run. He spent three years hiding in the Austrian Alps before making his way to Rome and being taken in by a Vatican bishop. He remained there for three months. While preparing to travel to Argentina on the 'ratline' he died unexpectedly, in July 1949, a few days after having lunch with an 'old comrade' whom he suspected of having been recruited by the Americans. In THE RATLINE Philippe Sands offers a unique account of the daily life of a Nazi fugitive, the love between Wachter and his wife Charlotte, who continued to write regularly to each other while he was on the run, and a fascinating insight into life in Rome and among American and Soviet spies active at the start of the Cold War. Using modern medical expertise, the door is unlocked to a mystery that haunts Wachter's youngest child, who believes his father was a good man - what was Wachter doing while in hiding, and what exactly caused his death? ISBN 9781474608145 -
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? is Seamas O'Reilly's memoir of growing up as one of eleven children in rural Northern Ireland in the 1990s after the death of their mother when Seamas was five. He delves into his family - his pleasingly eccentric, reticent but deeply loving father; his rambunctious siblings, intent on enforcing a byzantine age-based hierarchy; and the numerous bewildering friends, relations and neighbours who blew in and out to 'help'. Seamas describes how his mother's death changed his childhood relationships with everyone and everything, as knowledge of his tragic experience preceded him. He writes hilariously and tenderly of how his father, Joe, strove to give his children a happy home and a good education - building bookshelves in every room so as to avoid having to lecture them on the importance of academic achievement; videotaping and obsessively cataloguing more than 800 films so as not to have to take out a Blockbuster subscription; having the local nuns cook their Christmas turkey every year. This unusual childhood took place in Northern Ireland at the end of the Troubles, on the Irish border that Brexit has made once more into a hotly contested political frontier. Seamas describes living on that boundary, including the time an IRA bomb blew out their windows when he was three. We then follow Seamas through his teenage years as a nascent political radical and amateur satirist, and his arrival in Dublin as a university student. Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? is the story of a boy growing up; a family bonded by loss, love and mockery; and their triumphs and disasters as they reached for their goal of some kind of normality. ISBN 9780708899236 -
John Creedon has always been fascinated by place names, from when he was a young boy growing up in Cork City to travelling around Ireland making his popular television show. In this brilliant new book, he digs beneath the surface of familiar place names, peeling back the layers of meaning behind them to reveal stories about the nature of the land of Erin and the people who walked it before us. Travel the highways, byways and boreens of Ireland with John and become absorbed in the place names such as 'The Land of Robins', 'Patrick's Bed', 'The Eagles Nest', 'Hidden Treasure' and 'The Valley of the Crazy'. All hold clues to help uncover our past and make sense of that place we call home, feeding both mind and soul along the way. That Place We Call Home is an absorbing non-fiction debut from one of Ireland's broadcasting national treasures. ISBN 9780717192021 -
Richard Nairn has spent a lifetime studying - and learning from - nature. When an opportunity arose for him to buy a small woodland filled with mature native trees beside a fast-flowing river, he set about understanding all its moods and seasons, discovering its wildlife secrets and learning how to manage it properly. Wildwoods is a fascinating account of his journey over a typical year. Along the way, he uncovers the ancient roles of trees in Irish life, he examines lost skills such as coppicing and he explores new uses of woodlands for forest schools, foraging and rewilding. Ultimately, Wildwoods inspires all of us to pay attention to what nature can teach us. 'A book to inspire anyone who wants Ireland to grow more Irish trees.' Michael Viney. ISBN 9780717190218 -
Trans people in Britain today have become a culture war 'issue'. Despite making up less than one per cent of the country's population, they are the subjects of a toxic and increasingly polarized 'debate' which generates reliable controversy for newspapers and talk shows. This media frenzy conceals a simple fact: that we are having the wrong conversation, a conversation in which trans people themselves are reduced to a talking point and denied a meaningful voice. In this powerful new book, Shon Faye reclaims the idea of the 'transgender issue' to uncover the reality of what it means to be trans in a transphobic society. In doing so, she provides a compelling, wide-ranging analysis of trans lives from youth to old age, exploring work, family, housing, healthcare, the prison system and trans participation in the LGBTQ+ and feminist communities, in contemporary Britain and beyond. The Transgender Issue is a landmark work that signals the beginning of a new, healthier conversation about trans life. It is a manifesto for change, and a call for justice and solidarity between all marginalized people and minorities. Trans liberation, as Faye sees it, goes to the root of what our society is and what it could be; it offers the possibility of a more just, free and joyful world for all of us. ISBN 9780141991801 -
In the stirring, highly anticipated first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidency - a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil. Obama takes readers on a compelling journey from his earliest political aspirations to the pivotal Iowa caucus victory that demonstrated the power of grassroots activism to the watershed night of November 4, 2008, when he was elected 44th president of the United States, becoming the first African American to hold the nation's highest office. A Promised Land is extraordinarily intimate and introspective - the story of one man's bet with history, the faith of a community organizer tested on the world stage. Obama is candid about the balancing act of running for office as a Black American, bearing the expectations of a generation buoyed by messages of "hope and change," and meeting the moral challenges of high-stakes decision-making. He is frank about the forces that opposed him at home and abroad, open about how living in the White House affected his wife and daughters, and unafraid to reveal self-doubt and disappointment. Yet he never wavers from his belief that inside the great, ongoing American experiment, progress is always possible. ISBN 9780241491515 -
In Utopia for Realists, Rutger Bregman shows that we can construct a society with visionary ideas that are, in fact, wholly implementable. Every milestone of civilisation - from the end of slavery to the beginning of democracy - was once considered a utopian fantasy. New utopian ideas such as universal basic income and a fifteen-hour work week can become reality in our lifetime. From a Canadian city that once completely eradicated poverty, to Richard Nixon's near implementation of a basic income for millions of Americans, Bregman takes us on a journey through history, beyond the traditional left-right divides, as he introduces ideas whose time has come. 'Listen out for Rutger Bregman. He has a big future shaping the future' - Observer.'A more politically radical Malcolm Gladwell' - New York Times.'The Dutch wunderkind of new ideas'- Guardian. ISBN 9781408893210 -
"This book may not be life-changing but it certainly offers a fresh and witty perspective on the many subjects concerned with being a woman. Expect classic, dry, New York humour mixed with Ephron's uncensored and self-deprecating take on life." Carrie ISBN 9780857526939
