Our booksellers have picked out their favourite Irish books and Irish writing, so do have a browse of our Irish picks here and discover some new books from “the land of saints and scholars”… And remember – we offer Free Postage in ROI on orders over €30 – just choose the Free Postage option at checkout.
-
Irish language edition of The Slug and the Snail. Drawn from the Irish Traveller storytelling tradition, DeBhairduin's tale is a gentle allegory about difference, self-acceptance and different ways of seeing the world. Two slugs travel happily together as brothers, until they meet a crow who shows them that they have no home.Ashamed, one of the slugs decides to make himself a home, and calls himself snail. The brothers grow apart andbecome suspicious of each other. The slug with no shell-house feels ashamed until he learns to see that the very road he travels is his home, and so he shall never be homeless. The happy slug no longer sees himself through the judging eyes of others, but proudly asserts his place in the world. Great for Ages 1-7. -
'Working with homeless people has totally changed me, turned me inside out and upside down. They've challenged my values, they've changed the way I see Irish society, they've changed the way I see God, they've done everything for me.' - Fr Peter McVerryPublished to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Peter McVerry Trust, this book tells the story of the people behind it. The forty voices range from Paddy Fay, the first resident of Fr Peter McVerry's Tabor House hostel in 1979, to other service providers, sponsors, fundraisers and board members. Published to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Peter McVerry Trust, this book tells the story of the people behind it. The forty voices range from Paddy Fay, the first resident of Fr Peter McVerry's Tabor House hostel in 1979, to other service providers, sponsors, fundraisers and board members. Media voices include: Miriam O'Callaghan, Linda Martin, Rick O'Shea, Matt Cooper, Claire Byrne and Ray D'Arcy. With photos spanning forty years, including from Peter and contributors, this book highlights the impact that Peter and the charity have made, especially as Ireland's largest provider of Housing First services. Published 31st October 2023 - Order Now. -
A follow up to the hugely successful Why The Moon Travels, Twiggy Woman is a collection of Irish Traveller folklore ghost stories with eerie illustrations throughout by Helena Grimes. Publishing in time for Halloween, the stories here have never really been written or brought into mainstream English before. A collection of traveller folk tales and tales of the supernatural. -
On their arrival in Trieste in 1904, James Joyce left Norah Barnacle outside a railway station while he went to scare up money. He got embroiled in a fight with a couple of sailors and was locked up for his troubles. A penniless Norah was left alone for almost an entire day and night sitting on their suitcases at the station in a city where she knew no one and where she didn't speak the language. In real life, Norah waited for him. This novel asks - what if she hadn't? In Penelope Unbound, one of our greatest living novelists weaves a spellbinding speculative history. By unhooking Norah from her famous husband, Morrissy gives her a compelling new voice, with heartbreak and humanity all her own. Sensual, inventive and uproariously funny, Penelope Unbound reimagines a Joycean heroine for the 21st century. Published 5th October 2023 - Order Now. -
As Ballina prepares for its biggest weekend of the year, the simmering feud between small-time dealer, Cillian English, and County Mayo's fraternal enforcers, Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, spills over into violence and an ugly ultimatum. When the reclusive Dev answers his door on Friday night he finds Doll - Cillian's bruised, sullen, teenage brother - in the clutches of Gabe and Sketch. Jostled by his nefarious cousins, goaded by his dead mother's dog and struck by spinning lights, Dev is unwillingly drawn headlong into the Ferdias' revenge fantasy. Meanwhile, seventeen-year-old Nicky can't shake the feeling something bad has happened to her boyfriend Doll. Hungover, reeling from a fractious Friday night and plagued by ghosts of her own, Nicky sets out on a feverish mission to save Doll, even as she questions her future in Ballina. The beautifully crafted, thrillingly-told story of two outsiders striving to find themselves as their worlds collapse in chaos and violence, Wild Houses is the long-anticipated debut novel from award-winning and critically-acclaimed short story writer, Colin Barrett. Published 25th January 2024. Order Now. -
As Ballina prepares for its biggest weekend of the year, the simmering feud between small-time dealer, Cillian English, and County Mayo's fraternal enforcers, Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, spills over into violence and an ugly ultimatum. When the reclusive Dev answers his door on Friday night he finds Doll - Cillian's bruised, sullen, teenage brother - in the clutches of Gabe and Sketch. Jostled by his nefarious cousins, goaded by his dead mother's dog and struck by spinning lights, Dev is unwillingly drawn headlong into the Ferdias' revenge fantasy. Meanwhile, seventeen-year-old Nicky can't shake the feeling something bad has happened to her boyfriend Doll. Hungover, reeling from a fractious Friday night and plagued by ghosts of her own, Nicky sets out on a feverish mission to save Doll, even as she questions her future in Ballina. The beautifully crafted, thrillingly-told story of two outsiders striving to find themselves as their worlds collapse in chaos and violence, Wild Houses is the long-anticipated debut novel from award-winning and critically-acclaimed short story writer, Colin Barrett. Published 25th January 2024. Order Now.
-
A recovering addict drifts closer to the oblivion he’d hoped to avoid by returning to his home town; two estranged friends hide themselves away in a darkened pub, reluctant to attend the funeral of the woman they both loved; a bouncer who cannot envisage a world beyond the walls of the small town nightclub his life revolves around. Set for the most part in Glanbeigh, a small fictional town in County Mayo, the stories in Young Skins deftly explore the wayward lives and loves of young men and women. Published internationally and translated into several languages, Colin Barrett’s singular debut collection has been universally celebrated for its vigorous prose and ambitious storytelling. -
Ria and Marilyn have never met, but they're about to switch lives for the summer... Ria Lynch lives in a big, warm, Victorian house in Tara Road, Dublin, where her life revolves around family and friends. Marilyn Vine lives thousands of miles away in a quiet, modern house in New England. After a terrible loss, she has closed herself off from the world. Two more unlikely friends would be hard to find, but when each needs a place to escape to, a house exchange seems the ideal solution. Along with the borrowed houses come neighbours and friends, gossip and speculation, and Ria and Marilyn soon realise that swapping lives won't be the peaceful escape they'd been hoping for ... Though it might turn out to be exactly the change they both needed. -
Emer Martin's is a radical, vital voice in Irish writing, as she challenges the history of silence, institutional lies, evasion and the mistreatment of women across mid-to-late twentieth-century Ireland. Two families inhabit this immersive polyvocal work, an intergenerational saga announced with The Cruelty Men (2018) and continued here as punk rockers and Magdalene laundries spiral into a post-colonial Ireland still haunted by its tribal undertow. Scenes surface from Ireland's mythological past, Tudor plantations, workhouses and industrial schools, the Troubles laid bare, the transformative pre-digital decades playing out in this propulsive narrative. Thirsty Ghosts is epic in scope while intimate in focus. The Lyons, professionals in a newly independent state, are attacked by paramilitaries in their family home in Tyrone. The eccentric O'Conaills of Kerry, traumatized by displacement, find themselves in leafy Dublin 4. We encounter a servant who meets Henry VIII, a Lithuanian Jewish family who become part of the fabric of Dublin, and a wild young girl who escapes the laundry only to stumble into a psycho pimp. Related with dark humour, verve and high literary style, Thirsty Ghosts is a revelatory exploration of Ireland combining themes of power, class, fertility, violence and deep love, forces as universal as the old stories that permeate and illuminate each character's life. -
'When the story is finished, Muriel and Polly sit in silence. The coloured lights on the fuchsia bush twinkle against the black sea and the black mountain and the black sky. They sit in silence. They let the story settle.' For almost forty years, Eilis Ni Dhuibhne has captivated readers and critics alike with the dazzle and daring of her stories. Hailed as an original voice from her first collection, she has gone on to create a body of work that has established her as one of Ireland's finest and most compelling storytellers. The fourteen stories gathered here demonstrate the breadth of Ni Dhuibhne's achievement across her long writing career, particularly in terms of her depiction of the richly complex territory of women's lives. 'A fully contemporary writer working old magic; Ni Dhuibhne calls on ancient tradition to renew the way we see the world.'ANNE ENRIGHT -
In sixteen sparkling stories, Jan Carson introduces us to worlds and characters that feel real enough to touch. All of life is here: the thrill of growing up, the grief when youth is over; first love, mature love, parenthood and loss - all shot through with profound compassion, warm wit, and boundless imagination. In 'A Certain Degree of Ownership', a distracted couple on a beach fail to notice their baby crawl perilously towards the sea. In 'Troubling the Water', a rumour spreads at a public swimming pool and chaos ensues. In 'Fair Play' a dishevelled father loses his two sons in an adventure park. Every so often, an irresistible suggestion of the other world will surprise and delight, reaffirming Carson as a thrillingly original and audacious talent, and making Quickly, While They Still Have Horses the perfect introduction for readers new to her work. Published 4th April 2024 - Order Now. -
Former Chicago cop Cal Hooper has settled into life in a small Irish village, restoring furniture with his young friend Trey and sharing occasional nights with the fiercely independent Lena. But the reappearance of Trey's feckless father sends fissures through the fragile bonds of family that have started to form between the three of them - and brings a new threat to the town itself. So just how much will they compromise to protect - and avenge - the people they love? Published 29th February 2024 - Order Now. -
Former Chicago cop Cal Hooper has settled into life in a small Irish village, restoring furniture with his young friend Trey and sharing occasional nights with the fiercely independent Lena. But the reappearance of Trey's feckless father sends fissures through the fragile bonds of family that have started to form between the three of them - and brings a new threat to the town itself. So just how much will they compromise to protect - and avenge - the people they love? Published 29th February 2024 - Order Now.
-
A fearless portrait of a society on the brink as a mother faces a terrible choice, from an internationally award-winning author. On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland's newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and Eilish can only watch helplessly as the world she knew disappears. When first her husband and then her eldest son vanish, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a collapsing society. How far will she go to save her family? And what - or who - is she willing to leave behind? Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Prophet Song is a work of breathtaking originality, offering a devastating vision of a country at war and a deeply human portrait of a mother's fight to hold her family together. 'Paul Lynch is peerless' Donal Ryan, author of Strange Flowers An Irish Times 'Book to Look Forward to in 2023' -
An unmissable, radical essay from Emma Dabiri, bestselling author of Don't Touch My Hair and What White People Can Do Next. What part of your beautiful self were you taught to hate? We spend a lot of time trying to improve our 'defects', according to society's ideals of beauty. But these ideals that are often reductive, tyrannical and commercially entangled, imposed upon us by oppressive systems and further strengthened by our conditioned self-loathing. This book encourages unruliness, exploring the ways in which we can rebel against and subvert the current system. Offering alternative ways of seeing beauty, drawing on other cultures, worldviews, times, and places, as well as looking beyond the capitalist model - to reconnect with our birth right and find the inherent joy in our disobedient bodies. It accompanies The Cult of Beauty, a major exhibition at Wellcome Collection in Autumn 2023. Paperback / softback 128 pages Published 5th October 2023 - Order Now. -
A brand-new selection of recently broadcast essays, poems and stories first heard on the hugely popular RTÉ Radio 1 weekend programme. The wonderful mix of writing will move, amuse and delight the reader. Featuring pieces from 150 individual contributors, arranged around the months of the year, this is the perfect companion for a Christmas evening and for the year to come. Contributors include: Colm Tóibín, Niamh Campbell, Joseph O'Connor, Louise Kennedy, John F Deane, Susan McKay, Nicole Flattery, Donal Ryan, Manchán Magan, Rosaleen McDonagh, Lisa McInerney and many more... ISBN 9781848409040 Published 2nd October 2023 - Order Now. -
Following the death of her best friend, Erin has toget out of London. Returning home to Belfast, anau pair job provides a partial refuge from her griefand her volatile relationship with her mother. Erinspends late nights at the bar where her childhoodfriend Declan works. There she meets an Americanacademic who is also looking to get lost. Parallelto this she reconnects with an old flame, Mikey.This brings its own web of complications. With a startlingly fresh and original voice - jarringly funny, cranky, often hungover - Lazy City depicts the strange, meandering aftermath that follows disaster. Published 24th August 2023 - Order Now. -
From an exciting new voice in Irish fiction, a powerful novel set on an Irish clifftop - a story about duty, despair and the chance encounters upon which fate turns. Micheal Burns lives alone in his family's bungalow at the end of Kerry Head in Ireland. It is a picturesque place, but the cliffs have a darker side to them: for generations they have been a suicide black spot. Micheal's mother saw the saving of these lost souls - these visitors - as her spiritual duty, and now, in the wreckage of his life, Micheal finds himself continuing her work. When his sisters tell him that they want to sell the land, he must choose between his siblings and the visitors, a future or a past. -
Every now and again I need to get down here, to get into the Diogenes tub, as it were, or the Colmcille beehive hut, or the Mossbawn scullery. At any rate, a hedge surrounds me, the blackbird calls, the soul settles for an hour or two. For all his public eminence, Seamus Heaney seems never to have lost the compelling need to write personal letters. In this ample but discriminating selection from fifty years of his correspondence, we are given access as never before to the life and poetic development of a literary titan - from his early days in Belfast, through his controversial decision to settle in the Republic, to the gradual broadening of horizons that culminated in the award of a Nobel Prize and the years of international acclaim that kept him heroically busy until his death. Editor Christopher Reid draws from both public and private archives to reveal this story in the poet's own words. Generous, funny, exuberant, confiding, irreverent, empathetic and deeply thoughtful, the letters encompass decades-long relationships with friends and colleagues, as well as showing an unstinted responsiveness to passing acquaintances. Moreover, Heaney's joyous mastery of language is as evident here as it is in any of his writing for a literary readership. Listening to Heaney's voice, we find ourselves in the same room as a man whose presence, when he lived, enriched the world immeasurably, and whose legacy continues to deepen our sense of what truly matters. Published 5th October 2023 - Order Now. -
A talented but annoying Debut Author, suffering from writer’s block and mysterious headaches, ghosted by his girlfriend and on his last chance with his bartender job, takes refuge in the National Library of Ireland, hoping for some last-minute inspiration within those hallowed walls. Tortured by literary inadequacy and disappointed love, can he somehow absorb the famous modesty of Yeats, the wit of Edgeworth, the charm of Binchy, the wisdom of Heaney? But a weird twist of fate or perhaps a guiding hand reveals all is not what it seems in the library after dark, and The Author soon discovers: be careful what you wish for. In rich and abundant illustrations, Annie West tells a rowdy story of artistic struggle, ego and unexpected kindness. You will never look at the Irish Literary Canon in the same way again. Published 21st August 2023 - Order Now. -
The follow-up to The Pawnbroker’s Reward, his bestselling 2021 novel, Declan O’Rourke’s second instalment sees the inhabitants of Macroom and its surroundings landed squarely into the eye of the storm that is 1847, during Ireland’s Great Famine. After the landslide of their descent through 1846, Pádraig and Cáit Ua Buachalla awaken on the outskirts of Macroom to a new year fraught with the worst of weather, worse luck and a new level of problems that compound their desperate struggle to survive. In the heart of town, in the absence of her husband the pawnbroker, Paulellen Creed struggles to stay afloat. Follow this heart-wrenching story of tragedy and human beauty as, through the voices of Macroom in 1847, we hear a whisper from oblivion. Published 14th September 2023 - Order Now. -
Written over the course of ten years, while the author has been living in America’s northeast and southeast, Mary O’Donoghue’s stories in The Hour After Happy Hour reach into the wounds of immigration, transit, and exile. Here are modern, surreal dilemmas of rootlessness and failed returns. Here are people in their middle years struggling to be considered, let alone understood, in the fearsome day-to-day of the twenty-first century. Here too are the borders and battlefronts between parents and children. In each of these stories language is a first and last resort, and every sentence holds the force of fate. “Measured and ceaselessly inventive stories that are full of artistry.” — Mike McCormack “With her delicate touch, keen intelligence, and fine ear for the nuances of language, Mary O’Donoghue explores the restless tension between the pursuit of ‘a brighter life’, and the irresistible pull of home that’s forever fraught with difficulty and complication.” — Carys Davies Limited Edition Signed and Numbered Hardback Edition - 100 copies produced in total, '1' on Title Page denotes 1st Edition, 1st Printing. -
As the great James Bond said, 'History isn't kind to men who play God.' How right the dude ended up being. My secret double-life was finally catching up with me. Sorcha wanted a divorce. I was facing jail time for taking my orse out in a pub in Cork. And there was a very good chance that my sister-in-law's surrogate baby was actually mine? One by one, all of the goys turned their backs on me. Then came an unexpected plot twist. From beyond the grave, Fr Fehily - the M and the Q to our Leinster Schools Senior Cup-winning team - sent us all on one final mission... To walk the Camino - or die trying! It's, like, double oh fock! Published 17th August 2023 - Order Now. -
Let Secret Dublin guide you around the unusual and unfamiliar. Step off the beaten track with this fascinating Dublin travel guide book and let our local experts show you the well-hidden treasures of an amazing city. Ideal for local inhabitants, curious visitors and armchair travellers alike. The places included in our guides are unusual and unfamiliar, allowing one to step off the beaten track. Now in it's fourth edition, Secret Dublin features 140 secret and unusual locations. Discover the inner sanctum of Freemason's Hall, see Napoleon's toothbrush, marvel at a hoax plaque hidden in plain sight on O'Connell Bridge, try George IV's footprints for size, venture into a Georgian time capsule on Henrietta Street, cross the bridge beneath which William Rowan Hamilton had his 'Eureka' moment, explore a `museum' flat preserved exactly as it was almost 100 years ago, tune into the world of vintage radio in a Martello Tower, spot Dublin's subterranean river, or post your thoughts in a mystery letterbox ... Don't miss - Each chapter of this Secret Dublin - An unusual guide corresponds to a different part of the city so that one can always find a hidden or secret place to discover. Perfectly planned walks - Make sure that you do not miss any secret location, by discovering each one featured in this guide by planning a walking tour of each neighbourhood. -
Prepare to enter a world where the infatuation with death, ruin and destruction is total. Set in locations from New York to the west of Ireland, and to the nameless realms of the imagination, it is a world where beautiful but deranged children make lethal bombs, talented sculptors spend careers dismembering themselves in pursuit of their art, and wasters rise up with axes and turn into patricides. McCormack's celebrated debut collection is richly imaginative, bitterly funny, powerful and original. -
After suffering a catastrophic breakdown, J.J. O'Malley volunteers for a government project exploring the possibility of using coma as a means to keep prisoners under control. Floating in a maintained coma on a prison ship off the west coast of Ireland, his coma goes viral and the nation turns to watch. Brilliantly imagined and artfully constructed - merging science fiction with an affectionate portrait of small town Ireland - Notes from a Coma is a compassionate examination of a man cursed with guilt and genius. -
How do you rebuild the world? How do you put it back together? Nealon returns to his family home in Ireland for the first time in years, only to be greeted by a completely empty house. No heat or light, no furniture, no sign of his wife or child anywhere. It seems the world has forgotten that he even existed. The one exception is a persistent caller on the telephone, someone who seems to know everything about Nealon's life, his recent bother with the law and, more importantly, what has happened to his family. All Nealon needs to do is talk with him. But the more he talks the closer Nealon gets to the same trouble he was in years ago, tangled in the very crimes of which he claims to be innocent. Part roman noir, part metaphysical thriller, This Plague of Souls is a story for these fractured times, dealing with how we might mend the world and the story of a man who would let the world go to hell if he could keep his family together. Published 26th October 2023 - Order Now. -
A fearless portrait of a society on the brink as a mother faces a terrible choice, from an internationally award-winning author. On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland's newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and Eilish can only watch helplessly as the world she knew disappears. When first her husband and then her eldest son vanish, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a collapsing society. How far will she go to save her family? And what - or who - is she willing to leave behind? Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Prophet Song is a work of breathtaking originality, offering a devastating vision of a country at war and a deeply human portrait of a mother's fight to hold her family together. 'Paul Lynch is peerless' Donal Ryan, author of Strange Flowers An Irish Times 'Book to Look Forward to in 2023' -
Living in the Big Apple feels like a movie, especially when Aisling finds her ex-boyfriend John on her doorstep. Can his new-found devotion (and his new six-pack!) lure her back home, or should she continue to chase the American dream with the Irish Mafia and Jeff the ridey fireman? Meanwhile, in Ballygobbard, it’s all go. Baby showers are the new hen parties, Mammy and Dr Trevor are more serious than Aisling thought, and the prospect of two evil stepsisters has her doubting her place in the family. Pulled between head, heart and home, Aisling strives to finally create her own happy ever after. Published 31st August 2023 - Order Now. -
Drawn from the Irish Traveller storytelling tradition, DeBhairduin's tale is a gentle allegory about difference, self-acceptance and different ways of seeing the world. Two slugs travel happily together as brothers, until they meet a crow who shows them that they have no home. Ashamed, one of the slugs decides to make himself a home, and calls himself snail. The brothers grow apart and become suspicious of each other. The slug with no shell-house feels ashamed until he learns to see that the very road he travels is his home, and so he shall never be homeless. The happy slug no longer sees himself through the judging eyes of others, but proudly asserts his place in the world. Great for Ages 1-7. -
A gripping literary page-turner from a rising Irish talent in which former friends, estranged for twenty years, reckon with the terrifying events of the summer that changed their lives. In the seaside village of Kinlough, on Ireland's west coast, three old friends meet for the first time in years. They--Helen, Joe and Mush--were part of an original group of six inseparable teenagers in the summer of 2003, with motherless, reckless Kala Lanann at its white-hot center. But later that year, Kala disappeared without a trace. Now remains have been discovered in the woods--including a skull with a Polaroid photo tucked inside--and the town is both aghast and titillated at reopening this old wound. On the eve of this gruesome discovery, Helen had reluctantly returned for her father's wedding, the world-famous musician Joe had come home to dry out and reconnect with something authentic, and Mush had never left, too shattered by the events of that summer to venture beyond the counter of his mother's café. But when two more girls go missing, they are forced to confront their own complicity in the events that led to Kala's disappearance. Ultimately, they must do what others should have done before to stop the violent patterns of their town's past repeating themselves once again. In cracklingly vivid prose, Kala brilliantly examines the sometimes brutal costs of belonging, as well as the battle in the human heart between vengeance and forgiveness, despair and redemption. -
The disquieting story of an unidentified man as told by those who crossed paths with him on the last day of his life, Sheila Armstrong's debut novel is haunting, lyrical and darkly suspenseful. On an isolated beach set against a lonely, windswept coastline, a pale figure sits serenely against a sand dune staring out to sea. His hands are folded neatly in his lap, his ankles are crossed and there is a faint smile on his otherwise lifeless face. Months later, after a fruitless investigation, the nameless stranger is buried in an unmarked grave. But the mystery of his life and death lingers on, drawing the nearby villagers into its wake. From strandings to shipwrecks, it is not the first time that strangeness has washed up on their shores. Told through a chorus of voices, Falling Animals follows the crosshatching threads of lives both true and imagined, real and surreal, past and present. Slowly, over great time and distance, the story of one man, alone on a beach, begins to unravel. Elegiac and atmospheric, dark and disquieting, Sheila Armstrong's debut novel marks her arrival as one of the most uniquely gifted writers at work in literary fiction today. Signed by Sheila Armstrong in The Gutter Bookshop on 5th June 2023. Number '1' on Title Page denotes First Edition, First Printing. -
Written over the course of ten years, while the author has been living in America’s northeast and southeast, Mary O’Donoghue’s stories in The Hour After Happy Hour reach into the wounds of immigration, transit, and exile. Here are modern, surreal dilemmas of rootlessness and failed returns. Here are people in their middle years struggling to be considered, let alone understood, in the fearsome day-to-day of the twenty-first century. Here too are the borders and battlefronts between parents and children. In each of these stories language is a first and last resort, and every sentence holds the force of fate. “Measured and ceaselessly inventive stories that are full of artistry.” — Mike McCormack “With her delicate touch, keen intelligence, and fine ear for the nuances of language, Mary O’Donoghue explores the restless tension between the pursuit of ‘a brighter life’, and the irresistible pull of home that’s forever fraught with difficulty and complication.” — Carys Davies
-
The President is taking his dog for a walk in the mountains. It's the first time his pet has been on a hike and it's very excited. But when a storm hits, the President sends the pup off for help while he takes shelter on the mountainside. The courageous dog jumps fences, scales boulders and crosses wild rivers, until he meets the Mountain Rescue team, who take him on the most exciting trip ever as their helicopter flies to the rescue, getting the President and his dog home to the Aras just in time for tea! Great for Ages 0-6 Published 1st September 2023. Order Now. -
R.F. Foster's Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change, 1970-2000 examines how the country has weathered thirty years of rapid transformation, and what these changes may mean in the long run. From 1970, things were changing in Ireland - the Celtic Tiger had finally woken, and the rules for everything from gender roles and religion to international relations were being entirely rewritten. By the end of the twentieth century, Ireland had become a global brand, and the almost completely unexpected wave of prosperity had brought with it upheavals in economics, sexual mores and culture, as well as a shift in North-South attitudes. Roy Foster also looks at how characters as diverse as Gerry Adams, Mary Robinson, Charles Haughey and Bob Geldof have contributed to Ireland's altered psyche, and uncovers some of the scandals, corruption and marketing masterminds that have transformed Ireland - and its luck. 'Examines our society with fierce intelligence and insight' Colm Toibin, Irish Times Books of the Year 'Occasionally angry, sometimes whimsical and frequently hilarious. Appeals both to those who know nothing and those who think they know everything' Conor Gearty, Financial Times 'The brilliance of the writing places him as a historian in a league of his own ... A balanced work offering his own distinctive, original and elegant insights' Diarmaid Ferriter, ISBN 9780141017655 -
A vivid and original account of one of Ireland's greatest poets by an acclaimed Irish historian and literary biographerThe most important Irish poet of the postwar era, Seamus Heaney rose to prominence as his native Northern Ireland descended into sectarian violence. A national figure at a time when nationality was deeply contested, Heaney also won international acclaim, culminating in the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. In On Seamus Heaney, leading Irish historian and literary critic R. F. Foster gives an incisive and eloquent account of the poet and his work against the background of a changing Ireland. Drawing on unpublished drafts and correspondence, Foster provides illuminating and personal interpretations of Heaney's work. Though a deeply charismatic figure, Heaney refused to don the mantle of public spokesperson, and Foster identifies a deliberate evasiveness and creative ambiguity in his poetry. In this, and in Heaney's evocation of a disappearing rural Ireland haunted by political violence, Foster finds parallels with the other towering figure of Irish poetry, W. B. Yeats. Foster also discusses Heaney's cosmopolitanism, his support for dissident poets abroad, and his increasing focus in his later work on death and spiritual transcendence. Above all, Foster examines how Heaney created an extraordinary connection with an exceptionally wide readership, giving him an authority and power unique among contemporary writers. Combining a vivid account of Heaney's life and a compelling reading of his entire oeuvre, On Seamus Heaney extends our understanding of the man as it enriches our appreciation of his poetry. ISBN 9780241954249