The Stone House


Marita Conlon-McKenna - 2004
    It is time to return from Dublin, London and New York to Rossmore and the old stone house overlooking the Irish Sea where they grew up. But ancient jealousies surface as each sister confronts the past and the decisions they have made.For work-driven Kate it is time to take stock of her role as a high-flying ambitious lawyer and single parent; life is a battle between work and looking after Molly with little time for a proper relationship. Even Patrick, the man she once fell for, has ended up marrying her sister. Beautiful and intense Moya must take a hard look at her marriage to the charming but unfaithful Patrick and consider her own worth. For wild child Romy who has travelled the world and hasn't put a foot on Irish soil for years, it is time to finally stop running and find the courage to confront her family.A good and caring mother, Maeve Dillon has somehow over the years labelled each of her three daughters: Moya the beautiful, Kate the brains, and Romy, the bold and wild one. Now it is finally time for all three to break out of the box.

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.

The Therapy House


Julie Parsons - 2017
     On Sundays peace was restored. He would lie down, dream and remember. He would enjoy. And later on the bell would ring. He would get up and walk downstairs. He would open the front door. And his life would come to an end . . . Garda Inspector Michael McLoughlin is trying to enjoy his retirement – doing a bit of PI work on the side, meeting up with former colleagues, fixing up a grand old house in a genteel Dublin suburb near the sea. Then he discovers the body of his neighbour, a retired judge – brutally murdered, shot through the back of the neck, his face mutilated beyond recognition. McLoughlin finds himself drawn into the murky past of the murdered judge, which leads him back to his own father’s killing, decades earlier, by the IRA. In seeking the truth behind both crimes, a web of deceit, blackmail and fragile reputations comes to light, as McLoughlin’s investigation reveals the explosive circumstances linking both crimes – and dark secrets are discovered which would destroy the judge’s legendary family name.

The Dublin Trilogy Deluxe Part 1


Caimh McDonnell - 2021
    The series has been a critically acclaimed worldwide Amazon bestseller and it is optioned for TV.The two-part box set features the books with the ancillary novellas and short stories presented in the order the author Caimh McDonnell thinks they should be read in, with new introductions written especially for this edition.Please note: All of the novels and short stories have been previously available to readers separately.A Man With One of Those Faces: The first time somebody tried to kill him was an accident; the second time was deliberate. Now, Paul Mulchrone finds himself on the run with nobody to turn to except a nurse who has read one-too-many crime novels and a renegade copper with a penchant for violence. Together they must solve one of the most notorious crimes in Irish history before they’re history.Bloody Christmas: It’s Christmas Eve and DS Bunny McGarry is in the mood to celebrate – he’s back on duty after proving that throwing a senior officer off a building was an appropriate action during an investigation. His festivities are interrupted when someone attempts to assassinate him while he’s taking a leak. Bunny soon finds himself in a race against time to trace a kidnapped child before the people who ordered the hit realise that he is less dead than they had hoped.Dog Day Afternoon: Bunny McGarry always pays his debts, and if that means saving a certain dog from a date with the grim reaper, then so be it. Getting a canine off death row is not as simple as you’d think though, particularly when the pooch in question is a couple of biscuits short of a full dog’s dinner.The Day That Never Comes: Paul Mulchrone’s newly established detective agency is about to be DOA. One of his partners won’t talk to him for very good reasons and the other has seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth for no reason at all. Can he hold it together long enough to figure out what Bunny McGarry’s colourful past has to do with his present absence?

Our Man in Havana


Clive Francis - 2015
    So when the British Secret Service asks him to become their ‘man in Havana’ he can’t afford to say no. There’s just one problem…he doesn’t know anything! To avoid suspicion, he begins to recruit nonexistent sub-agents, concocting a series of intricate fictions. But Wormold soon discovers that his stories are closer to the truth than he could have ever imagined… In Clive Francis’ adaptation, Graham Greene’s classic satirical novel becomes a wonderfully funny and fast-moving romp.

White City


Kevin Power - 2021
    ?Shortlisted for the 2021 An Post Irish Book Awards Eason Novel of the Year...A darkly funny, gripping and profoundly moving novel about a life spinning out of control, a life live without the bedrock of familial love, and the corruption of material wealth that tears at the soul. ‘It was my father’s arrest that brought me here, although you could certainly say that I took the scenic route.’Here is rehab, where Ben – the only son of a rich South Dublin banker – is piecing together the shattered remains of his life. Abruptly cut off, at the age of 27, from a life of heedless privilege, Ben flounders through a world of drugs and dead-end jobs, his self-esteem at rock bottom. Even his once-adoring girlfriend, Clio, is at the end of her tether.  Then Ben runs into an old school friend who wants to cut him in on a scam: a shady property deal in the Balkans. The deal will make Ben rich and, at one fell swoop, will deliver him from all his troubles: his addictions, his father’s very public disgrace, and his own self-loathing and regret. Problems solved. But something is amiss. For one thing, the Serbian partners don’t exactly look like fools. (In fact they look like gangsters.) And, for another, Ben is being followed everywhere he goes. Someone is being taken for a ride. But who?

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

Exile


Pádraic Ó Conaire - 1910
    Emerging from the hospital, he has lost an arm and a leg, and his face has been disfigured. He becomes a sideshow freak to support himself, traveling around England and even back to Galway, but he eventually returns to London, where he dies, down and out, in one of the city's parks.

Postcard Stories


Jan Carson - 2017
    Each of these tiny stories was inspired by an event, an overheard conversation, a piece of art or just a fleeting glance of something worth thinking about further.Collected in one volume, Carson's postcards present a panoramic view of contemporary Belfast -- its coffee shops, streets and museums and airports -- and offer it to the wider world. Even as they seem to spring from a writer's solitary perspective, taken together, these observations and their distribution speak of human connectedness. Like a pleasant surprise in the mail, this collection reminds us how many friendships are born and strengthened in a story shared.Illustrated by Benjamin Phillips.

Music Love Drugs War


Geraldine Quigley - 2019
    That's some feat, but Geraldine Quigley has managed to make it seem easy' Roddy DoyleA tender, devastating coming-of-age debut novel about friendship, innocence and warThe end of the school year is approaching, and siblings Paddy and Liz McLaughlin, Christy Meehan, Kevin Thompson and their friends will soon have to decide what they're going to do with the rest of their lives. But it's hard to focus when there's the allure of their favourite hangout place, the dingy 'Cave', where they go to drink and flirt and smoke. Most days, Christy, Paddy and Kevin lie around listening to Dexys and Joy Division. Through a fog of marijuana, beer and budding romance, the future is distant and unreal.But this is Derry in 1981, and they can't ignore the turmoil of the outside world. A friend is killed, and Christy and Paddy, stunned out of their stupor, take matters into their own hands. Some choices are irreversible, and choosing to fight will take hold of their lives in ways they never imagined.With humour and compassion, Geraldine Quigley reveals the sometimes slippery reasons behind the decisions we make, and the unexpected and intractable ways they shape our lives.

Fizzles


Samuel Beckett - 1976
    All the Fizzles are included in the collection The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989(description from Wikipedia)

Tara Flynn


Geraldine O'Neill - 2002
    But the wealthy Fitzgeralds who live at Ballygrace have little time for village girls, until Madeleine, their unstable, delicate daughter, meets Tara. Tara is everything Madeleine isn't, yet the two girls find themselves becoming firm friends. When Tara meets Gabriel, Madeleine's older brother, she becomes painfully aware of the differences between the Fitzgeralds and the Flynns. Without a wealthy family behind her, Tara will have to work her way to the life she dreams of. Then Tara finds herself with a heartbreaking decision to make, and must leave the world of Ballygrace behind her and flee to England . . .

Carn


Patrick McCabe - 1993
    Carn is the story of two women; Josie Keenan, who returns to Carn, Ireland, the provincial hometown she once left behind, and Sadie Rooney, a factory worker who dreams of leaving. As the two women strike up a friendship--fueled by hopes to better their lives, yet inextricably tied to the tenuous fate of Carn--each must confront the hard truths of her past and future. And despite its own attempt to thrive, the town itself cannot escape the daily reminders of Ireland's endless legacy of violence and unrest.Written in the raw, unsparing prose that marks McCabe's fiction, Carn is the timeless story of a small town struggling to break away from its bleak past, and the lives of two women aching to escape the forces that shaped them.

Ireland: A Short History


Joseph Coohill - 2005
    Starting with the first prehistoric inhabitants of the island, the book takes us right up to the present day, covering the Great Famine, Home Rule, the Good Friday Agreement, and beyond. Clear and lucid, Coohill’s writing paints an engaging picture of a people for whom history is a key part of present-day reality. Reviewing differing historical interpretations, Coohill allows the reader to come to their own conclusions. Highly accessible, yet demonstrating a sophisticated level of analysis, this book will continue to provide a valuable resource to tourists, students and all those wishing to acquaint themselves further with the complex identity of the Irish people.

The Shadow of a Gunman


Seán O'Casey - 1923
    It centres on a building tenant who is mistaken for an IRA assassin.