Best of
Irish-Literature

2014

All Growed Up: What Breadboy Did at University


Tony Macaulay - 2014
    He is a real man now, so he is, and shaving twice a week. To follow his successful career as a breadboy, he aims to go where few people from the upper Shankill have boldly gone before: to university.' All Growed Up is the sequel to Tony Macaulay's memoirs Paperboy and Breadboy. It follows Tony as he leaves the Shankill for life as a student in Coleraine, where he discovers true love, sex, socialism and screen tests. Touching, funny and nostalgic, All Growed Up will delight Tony's many fans. It's the book in which the retired paperboy finally grows up.

The Closet of Savage Mementos


Nuala Ní Chonchúir - 2014
    Leaving home is a way to escape her sorrow and despair following the death of her boyfriend and a testy relationship with her mother, Verity. In Scotland she encounters love and excitement but when a series of unexpected events turn her new found life on its head, she is forced to make a life-changing decision, one that will stay with her for her whole life. The Closet of Savage Mementos is drawn directly from the author's own experiences and explores heartbreak, loss, motherhood and adoption in a gripping narrative and the same expressive, emotive and exciting prose we have come to expect of Nuala Ní Chonchúir. Reviews: 'Her finest novel yet.' - The Sunday Times Ní Chonchúir manages to strike a delicate balance between passion and poetry…The Closet of Savage Mementos is a book that will appeal to, and deserves, a wide audience.’ -- Sunday Business Post 'It is raw, beautiful and compelling, a 'must read'.' - Sunday Independent mpelling and deeply accomplished, The Closet of Savage Mementos is the product of a powerful literary talent. - Cork Evening Echo About the Author: Nuala Ní Chonchúir was born in Dublin in 1970; she lives in East Galway with her husband and three children. Her fourth short story collection Mother America was published by New Island in 2012; The Irish Times said of it: ‘Ní Chonchúir’s precisely made but deliciously sensual stories mark her as a carrier of Edna O’Brien’s flame.’ Her début novel You (New Island, 2010) was called ‘a gem’ by the Irish Examiner and ‘a heart-warmer’ by The Irish Times. A chapbook of flash fiction, Of Dublin and Other Fictions, is just out from Tower Press in the US. Nuala has won many writing awards including RTÉ radio’s Francis MacManus Award, the Cúirt New Writing Prize, the Jane Geske Award (USA), the inaugural Jonathan Swift Award, the Dublin Review of Books flash fiction prize and the Cecil Day Lewis Award. She was shortlisted for the European Prize for Literature and most recently won the Gladstone’s Library Flash Fiction Prize (UK).www.nualanichonchuir.com

Flight


Oona Frawley - 2014
    Elizabeth’s mother rang her morning, noon and night. He’s driving me mad with his pepper talk, she said, I’ll crown him if he talks to me about the need for Vietnam to join the International Pepper Community and duties and postmen one more time! The cracks one begins to see in families.Flight is the story of four travellers as their journeys intersect one winter in Dublin.Sandrine, a Zimbabwean woman who has left her husband and son behind in the hope of making a better life for them in Ireland, is alone and secretly pregnant. She finds herself working as a carer for Tom and Clare, a couple whose travels are ending as their minds begin to fail. Meanwhile Elizabeth, their world-weary daughter, carries the weight of her own body’s secret.Set in Ireland in 2004 as a referendum on citizenship approaches, Flight is a magically observed story of a family and belonging, following the gestation of a friendship during a year of crisis. A story of arrival and departure, the newly found and the left behind, Flight is among a new breed of Irish novel – one that recognizes the global nature of Ireland experience in the late 20th century, and one that considers Ireland in the aftermath of the failed Celtic Tiger.

If Ever You Go: A Map of Dublin in Poetry and Song


Pat Boran - 2014
    A virtual tour of the city and its environs, If Ever You Go takes the reader on a journey through streets broad and narrow, featuring verse both familiar and new, historical and contemporary, by writers whose work adds up to a intimate and revealing portrait of a place and its people. Contributors include poets already synonymous with the city - Swift, Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, Clarke and Kavanagh, among them - as well as a host of others, Kinsella, Heaney, Boland, Bolger and Meehan among them, who have made some part of it their own. Street singers and balladeers rub shoulders with haiku and performance poets in a book that sets its heart on the very streets we live, work and play on. Groundbreaking in its reach, celebratory in its outlook, If Ever You Go is a record of the epiphanies and disappointments, the morning visions and the late-night wanderings that between them make up the map of a city where poetry truly matters.

Davy Byrnes Stories 2014


Sara Baume - 2014
    The six prize-winning stories from the 2014 Davy Byrnes Short Story Award.'Solesearcher1' by Sara Baume (2014 Award Winner) 'Go Down Sunday' by Trevor Byrne 'Harvest' by Julian Gough 'The Iron Age' by Arja Kajermo 'Absence' by Colm McDermott 'The Dinosaurs On Other Planets' by Danielle McLaughlinThe six stories are published with the judges' comments and with notes by the authors.

Thomas Clarke


Helen Litton - 2014
    He was a member of the Supreme Council of the IRB from 1915 and was one of the rebels who planned the 1916 Rising. He was the first signatory of the Proclamation of Independence and was with the group that occupied the GPO. He was executed on the 3rd of May 1916.This accessible biography outlines Clarke's life, from joining the Republican Brotherhood as an eighteen year old, to his execution at the age of fifty-nine.

Blue is the Night


Eoin McNamee - 2014
    Lance Curran is set to prosecute a young man for a brutal murder, in the 'Robert the Painter' case, one which threatens to tear society apart. In the searing July heat, corruption and justice vie as Harry Ferguson, Judge Curran's fixer, contemplates the souls of men adrift, and his own fall from grace with the beautiful and wilful Patricia. Within three years, Curran will be a judge, his nineteen year old daughter dead, at the hands of a still unknown murderer, and his wife Doris condemned to an asylum for the rest of her days.In Blue Is the Night, it is Doris who finally emerges from the fog of deceit and blame to cast new light into the murder of her daughter - as McNamee once again explores and dramatizes a notorious and nefarious case.

The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism


Joe Cleary - 2014
    This volume serves as an incisive and accessible overview of that brilliant period in which Irish artists not only helped to create a distinctive nationalist literature but also changed the face of European and anglophone culture. This Companion surveys developments in modernist poetry, drama, fiction and the visual arts. Early innovators, such as Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Jack B. Yeats and James Joyce, as well as late modernists, including Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett, Flann O'Brien, Mairtin O Cadhain and Francis Bacon, all appear here. Significantly, however, this volume ranges beyond such iconic figures to open up new ground with chapters on Irish women modernists, Irish American modernism, Irish-language modernism and the critical reception of modernism in Ireland."