The Summer Visitors


Fiona O'Brien - 2017
    He's hoping that three months researching an old cable station in a remote village on the south-west coast of Ireland will help him and his traumatised son finally move on from the accident that killed his wife.Meanwhile local hotel owner's daughter Annie Sullivan has communication problems of her own to deal with. Home on sabbatical from her life in London, she's keeping a secret from her dysfunctional family and trying to save them and the hotel from their latest drama.As summer draws to a close in Ballyanna, both Dan and Annie are forced to confront the pasts they've been escaping. But will they be able to grasp the future that lies ahead? The Summer Visitors is a heart-warming story about love, second chances and moving on.

Hostages


Oisín Fagan - 2016
    My heart is broken and my failure is total.A bomb is born, lives and dies in a rural secondary school; Ireland becomes a dumping ground for corpses; one family’s genealogy begins in tragedy in 1574 and ends in something far worse in 2111; a strange tribal matriarchy on the banks of the River Boyne is threatened with extermination.Over the course of these stories, the world breaks down in an endless cycle of hunger, desperation, violence and domination, and we find a humanity left tender, collapsed, and full of a beautiful, primeval innocence.Fagan’s raw blend of verve, humour, imagination and warmth surges through these pages, revealing a world rendered both hopeful and disturbing, human and other, that is at once familiar and extraordinary.

The Glass Lake


Maeve Binchy - 1994
    For it is a place where change comes slowly. drowned in the lake, and then the gossip runs wild. The consequences for Helen's husband, her son, but above all for her daughter, Kit, are unimaginable and will leave not one of their lives unchanged.

The Sandcastle


Iris Murdoch - 1957
    Mor, hoping to enter politics, becomes aware of new desires and a different dream of life. A complex battle develops, involving love, guilt, magic, art and political ambition. Mor's teenage children and their mother fight discreetly and ruthlessly against the invader. The Head, himself enchanted, advises Mor to seize the girl and run. The final decision rests with Rain. Can a 'great love' be purchased at too high a price?

What are You Like?


Anne Enright - 2000
    way she writes about women ...their adventures to know who they are through sex, despair, wit and single-minded courage." In What Are You Like?, Maria Delahunty, raised by her grieving father after her mother died during childbirth, finds herself in her twenties awash in nameless longing and in love with the wrong man. Going through his things, she finds a photograph that will end up unraveling a secret more devastating than her father's long mourning, but more pregnant with possibility. Moving between Dublin, New York, and London, What Are You Like? is a breathtaking novel of twins and irretrievable losses, of a woman haunted by her missing self, and of our helplessness against our fierce connection to our origins. What Are You Like? has been selected as a finalist for the Whitbread Award. It is a novel, Newsday wrote, that "announces [Enright's] excellence as though it were stamped on the cover in boldface." "Richly descriptive ... Slightly surreal, revelatory images are hallmarks of Enright's writing, which beguiles throughout." -- Melanie Rehak, US Weekly "Cool, wicked, and quintessentially Irish ... Anne Enright tells a sharp, stylish tale in an accent all her own." -- Annabel Lyon, The National Post (Toronto)

Seascape With Sharks and Dancer


Don Nigro - 1985
    The play is set in a beach bungalow. The young man who lives there has pulled a lost young woman from the ocean. Soon, she finds herself trapped in his life and torn between her need to come to rest somewhere and her certainty that all human relationships turn eventually into nightmares. The struggle between his tolerant and gently ironic approach to life and her strategy of suspicion and attack becomes a kind of war about love and creation which neither can afford to lose. This is an offbeat, wonderful love story. Note: The play contains a wealth of excellent monologue and scene material.

Reading in the Dark


Seamus Deane - 1996
    The matter: a deadly betrayal, unspoken and unspeakable, born of political enmity. As the boy listens through the silence that surrounds him, the truth spreads like a stain until it engulfs him and his family. And as he listens, and watches, the world of legend--the stone fort of Grianan, home of the warrior Fianna; the Field of the Disappeared, over which no gulls fly--reveals its transfixing reality. Meanwhile the real world of adulthood unfolds its secrets like a collection of folktales: the dead sister walking again; the lost uncle, Eddie, present on every page; the family house "as cunning and articulate as a labyrinth, closely designed, with someone sobbing at the heart of it."Seamus Deane has created a luminous tale about how childhood fear turns into fantasy and fantasy turns into fact. Breathtakingly sad but vibrant and unforgettable, Reading in the Dark is one of the finest books about growing up--in Ireland or anywhere--that has ever been written.

Great Granny Webster


Caroline Blackwood - 1977
    Heiress to the Guinness fortune, Blackwood was celebrated as a great beauty and dazzling raconteur long before she made her name as a strikingly original writer. This macabre, mordantly funny, partly auto-biographical novel reveals the gothic craziness behind the scenes in the great houses of the aristocracy, as witnessed through the unsparing eyes of an orphaned teenage girl. Great Granny Webster herself is a fabulous monster, the chilliest of matriarchs, presiding with steely self-regard over a landscape of ruined lives.

The Crocodile by the Door: The Story Of A House, A Farm & A Family


Selina Guinness - 2012
    The Crocodile by the Door by Selina Guinness is a remarkable, compelling and moving memoir of a farm, a family and a home.When Selina Guinness and her partner Colin, both young academics, moved in with Selina's uncle Charles, an elderly bachelor, they had no idea what the coming years held for them: a crash course in farming, tense discussions with helicopter-borne property developers, human tragedy, and the challenge of dragging a quasi-feudal estate at the edge of Dublin into the twenty-first century.The Crocodile by the Door - a dazzling debut memoir that will appeal to fans of Edmund de Waal, William Fiennes and Richard Benson's The Farm - tells this remarkable story.

Graham Greene: The Enemy Within


Michael Shelden - 1994
    "Bold and unhesitating".--Times Literary Supplement (London). 16 pages of photos.

Castle Rackrent and Ennui


Maria Edgeworth - 1809
    Thady will defend his masters to the end, but eventually his naivety and blind loyalty cause him to ignore the warning signs as the family's excesses lead them to ruin. This volume also includes Ennui, the entertaining 'confessions' of the Earl of Glenthorn, a bored, spoiled aristocrat. Desperate to be free from 'the demon of ennui', Glenthorn's quest for happiness takes him through violence and revolution, and leads to intriguing twists of fate. Both novels offer a darkly comic and satirical exposé of the Irish class system, and a portrait of a nation in turmoil.

Lion in the Streets


Judith Thompson - 1992
    The ghost of a young murdered girl flits through every scene linking the pain and anguish of all the characters struggling to cope with urban life.

The Illusionist


Jennifer Johnston - 1995
    At first, life is blissfully sweet, but when her first novel turns brings overnight fame, the women's life changes out of all recognition.

Under Milk Wood


Dylan Thomas - 1954
    A moving and hilarious account of a spring day in a small Welsh coastal town, Under Milk Wood is "lyrical, impassioned and funny, an Our Town given universality" (The New Statesman and Nation).

Naked Masks: Five Plays


Luigi Pirandello - 1952
    His modern and sensationally original plays dramatize with force and eloquence the isolation of the individual from society and from himself.The editor, Eric Bentley, is an international theater authority. In addition to the Introduction and the biographical and bibliographical material in the Appendices, Mr. Bentley has prepared for this volume the first English translations of the play Liolà and Pirandello's important "Preface" to Six Characters in Search of an Author.Included Plays: Liolà It Is So! (If You Think So) Henry IV Six Characters in Search of an Author Each in His Own Way