What the Footman saw . . . In 1930s Ireland, Joe Grady becomes the footman at the stately home Cliffenden, owned by the glamorous Fullerton family. Joe is enthralled by the intrigue and scandal above stairs, and soon becomes a favourite of the daughter of the house, Cassie. There is mounting pressure on Cassie to marry American banker Wally Stanton. But Cassie is having a secret affair with the unsuitable Bowden Grey. What the Footman did . . . When Cassie and Bowden’s affair is discovered in disgraceful circumstances, the lovers are banned from seeing each other. Joe risks his position at Cliffenden, becoming a messenger between them, until he finds himself making a choice that will change the lives of everyone at Cliffenden forever. Decades later, Joe has achieved great success as a barrister. When suddenly Cassieis arrested for a sensational crime, he sets out to discover what happened to her in the intermittent years. He realises his actions at Cliffenden set off a chain of events that led to murder. But is Cassie guilty? Innocent or guilty, can Joe ever make amends for his part in her downfall?

    Despite having a dog called Killer and being in love with the girl next door, everyone calls him 'gay'. It doesn't help that his best friend is his little sister, Wee Maggie, and that everyone knows he loves his Ma more than anything in the world. He doesn't think much of his older brother Paddy and really doesn't like his Da. He dreams of going to America, taking Wee Maggie and Ma with him, to get them away from Belfast and Da. Mickey realises it's all down to him. He has to protect Ma from herself. And sometimes, you have to be a bad boy to be a good son.

    Sometimes these dramas are found in ordinary, mundane situations; sometimes they are triggered by a fateful encounter or a tragic decision. At the heart of these stories, crucially, is how people are drawn to each other and cling to love when and where it can be found. In a number of the these stories, emotional bonds are forged by traumatic events caused by one of the characters - between an old man and the frightened young burglar left to guard him while his brother is beaten; between another young man and the mother of a girl whose death he caused when he crashed his car; between a lonely middle-aged shopkeeper and her assistant. Disconnection and new discoveries pervade stories involving emigration (an Irish priest in war-torn Syria) or immigration (an African refugee in Ireland). Some of the stories are set in the same small town in rural Ireland as the novels, with names that will be familiar to Ryan's readers.In haunting prose, Donal Ryan has captured the brutal beauty of the human heart in all its failings, hopes and quiet triumphs.

    The story is a simple one, but told in a way that keeps you reading as much for the elegance of the telling as for the action it describes. Here is prose with a light, sunny breeze blowing through it... Why can't more people write like this? A little gem.' - The Age'colourful, evocative and energetic' - Sydney Morning Herald'Kim Kelly's Wild Chicory is told with wit, warmth and courage. It's an ode to the splendour to be found in a simple life and the hope for something better, even if you must risk everything to achieve it.' - Newtown Review of BooksWild Chicory is a novella that takes the reader on an immigrant journey from Ireland to Australia in the early 1900s, along threads of love, family, war and peace. It's a slice of ordinary life rich in history, folklore and fairy tale, and a portrait of the precious relationship between a granddaughter, Brigid, and her grandmother, Nell.From the windswept, emerald coast of County Kerry, to the slums of Sydney's Surry Hills; and from the bitter sectarian violence of Ulster, to tranquillity of rural New South Wales, Brigid weaves her grandmother's tales into a small but beautiful epic of romance and tragedy, of laughter and the cold reality of loss. It's Nell's tales, tall and true, that spur Brigid to write her own, too.Ultimately, it's a story of finding your feet in a new land - be that a new country, or a new emotional space - and the wonderful trove of narrative we carry with us wherever we might go.

    In three sections entitled ‘Clasp’, ‘Cleave’ and ‘Clench’, Ní Ghríofa engages in a strikingly physical way with the world of her subject matter. The result is by times what one poem calls ‘A History in Hearts’, among other things an intimate exploration of love, childbirth and motherhood, and simultaneously a place of separation and anxiety. In one poem set in the boys’ home in Letterfrack, a place of undeniable terror, we see how, in the name of religion, “The earth holds small skulls like seeds”.

    Reapy, Charlotte Riddell, Eimear Ryan, Anakana Schofield, Somerville & Ross, Susan Stairs.Taken together, the collected works of these writers reveal an enrapturing, unnerving, and piercingly beautiful mosaic of a lively literary landscape. Spanning four centuries, The Long Gaze Back features 8 rare stories from deceased luminaries and forerunners, and 22 new unpublished stories by some of the most talented Irish women writers working today. The anthology presents an inclusive and celebratory portrait of the high calibre of contemporary literature in Ireland.These stories run the gamut from heartbreaking to humorous, but each leaves a lasting impression. They chart the passions, obligations, trials and tribulations of a variety of vividly-drawn characters with unflinching honesty and relentless compassion. These are stories to savour.

    An emigrant to England in the 1970s, Felicity Hayes-McCoy knew she'd return to Corca Dhuibhne, Ireland's Dingle peninsula, a place she had fallen in love with at seventeen. Now she and her husband have restored a stone house there, the focus for this chronicle in response to reader requests for a sequel to her memoir, The House on an Irish Hillside. Enough Is Plenty - The Year On The Dingle Peninsula celebrates the seasonal rhythms in and around the author's house and garden at the western end of Ireland's Dingle Peninsula. It is about ordinary small pleasures, such as the smell of freshly baked soda bread, that can easily go unnoticed, and offers recipes from Felicity's kitchen and information on organic food production and gardening.

    In the last hours of the 1916 Easter Rising, 20-year old Charlie Saurin came face to face with his Commander-in-Chief, Patrick Pearse.In a final gamble, Pearse had a desperate plan to save the collapsing rebellion.It required the sacrifice of Saurin and his comrades.The Scrap is the true story of the rising, from first-hand evidence, as seen by one rebel unit - F Company, 2nd Battalion - following them from the first skirmish in Fairview to the inferno of the GPO.Told in the context of some of the major events of that week, the story of F Company brings alive the excitement, the humour, the horror and the contradictions of that decisive moment in the creation of the Irish state.

    This beautifully illustrated collection contains the greatest poems from the greatest Irish poets, including Jonathan Swift, Thomas Moore, Oscar Wilde, WB Yeats, James Joyce, Patrick Kavanagh and Seamus Heaney. Discover classic works such as My Dark Rosaleen and The Ballad of Reading Gaol alongside more modern pieces such as Postscript, He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, Epic and The Planter’s Daughter.

    Visitors to Ireland are often surprised at the 'palm trees' that make so many gardens look as if they belong in a holiday postcard. How can such exotics survive on an island that is as far north as the prairies of Canada and the pine forests of Siberia? The answer lies in the tail of the Gulf Stream - the North Atlantic Drift - which wraps around this green land on the western edge of Europe. Its warm and watery embrace bestows the renowned 'soft' climate that allows those palm trees (in fact, New Zealand cordylines) to make their homes here - along with tree ferns from Australia and bananas from Japan. Plants from colder regions, including rhododendrons, primulas and all manner of alpines, are equally happy. So, with a range of plants that runs from the subtropical to the subarctic, and a landscape that varies from gently pastoral to savagely rugged, the aptly named Emerald Isle has some of the most romantic and interesting gardens in the world. The result of a lifetime visiting, considering and writing about gardens in Ireland, and several years of dedicated photography, this is a truly comprehensive exploration of a fascinating subject.

     Ellis O’Donovan was an American through and through. He had no intention of going to his ancestral home in Ireland. After all, his parents were chased out by the English. But his mother insists on being taken back to die at her old estate, Kilpara. Ellis reluctantly agrees, expecting a quick round trip. Kilpara and its residents have other plans. The strife Ellis finds between his desire to return to his life in America, and to aid his kin in Ireland reaches a dangerous pinnacle when he meets Morrigan, the daughter of the very English overlord who has taken his birthright.

    Six feet tall, elegantly beautiful and passionately political, this British heiress turned Irish revolutionary was the muse the young poet had been seeking. He would spread his dreams under her feet, as together they set about creating a new Ireland, through his poetry and her politics.Yeats forged a poetic career from his unrequited love for Gonne and her proud and passionate “pilgrim soul”. But as the narrator of the story says, “when looked at from the other side of the bedsheets, most tales take a turning… and this one’s no different.” Their personal and political passion was fired by a shared interest in mind-altering substances and experiences, including hashish and mescalin, occult magic rituals and nationalistic fervour. The true story of what happened between these larger-than-life characters is more complex, and altogether more intriguing, than Yeats’s poetic myth.THE SECRET ROSE (1897) by WB YeatsWB Yeats was a magician as well as a writer, a member of the secret occult society, The Golden Dawn. The 17 talismanic stories in his mystical book, The Secret Rose, revolve around men who must spend themselves in service to that rose, an occult symbol representing the ideal, the absolute, the self beyond self. When Yeats originally published these stories, his publisher refused to include two final stories that are here restored, to create the volume that the author originally intended - alongside the story of the passionate relationship that fired his vision and shaped his fictions.Together, the two books in this twin-volume - a tribute edition by Orna Ross in celebration of Yeats’s 150th birth anniversary - offer a unique combination of secrets and intrigue, passion and politics, mystery and magic.

    At first Eric believes it to be just a lethal virus, but all that changes when the dead start to come back to life and the giant man-eating-rats appear with a voracious appetite for human flesh. Eric's pregnant girlfriend and ailing grandmother need to be brought to hospital to be inoculated and protected from the virus. But getting there will be nearly impossible as the streets are now overrun by the giant vermin and psychotic creatures that were once his neighbours and friends. Eric finds himself in a battle to stay alive long enough to save his loved ones. The Dust is the second novel by award winning author Jonathan Lynch

    Not so much a stream of consciousness as an unconscious railing against a life that makes little sense, it is a shocking and intimate insight into the thoughts, feelings, and chaotic sexuality of a vulnerable and isolated protagonist. To read A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing is to plunge inside its narrator’s head, experiencing her world at first hand. This isn’t always comfortable—but it is always a revelation. Adapted for the stage by Annie Ryan for The Corn Exchange, Eimear McBride's A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing premiered at the Dublin Theatre Festival 2014.

    It offers an in-depth exploration of Trollope's time in Ireland as a rising Post Office official, contextualising his considerable output of Irish novels and short stories and his ongoing interest in the country, its people, and its always complicated relationship with Britain. Trollope's Irish novels were long neglected but are vital to any understanding of his entire oeuvre and when given their just place alter our overall view of the writer and his take on the world. Uniquely among his fellow English novelists, Trollope consciously occupied a mediating position, believing he knew Ireland better than any other Englishman and better than most Irishmen and used his novels to represent that Ireland to an English public. Trollope's Irish works constitute a vital and distinct group of works, add significantly to our vision of the writer, change the prevalent view that he is always safe and "English," and represent a rich and underestimated contribution to the canon of the nineteenth century Irish novel tout court, complicating the sometimes arbitrary divisions that are drawn between the English and the Irish traditions.