The book also includes some of her best fiction pieces.

    In this stunningly unusual prose debut, Doireann Ni Ghriofa sculpts essay and autofiction to explore inner life and the deep connection felt between two writers centuries apart. In the 1700s, an Irish noblewoman, on discovering her husband has been murdered, drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary poem. In the present day, a young mother narrowly avoids tragedy. On encountering the poem, she becomes obsessed with its parallels with her own life, and sets out to track down the rest of the story. A devastating and timeless tale about one woman freeing her voice by reaching into the past and finding another's.

    This is a glorious book that bears all the marks of a classic."When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." So begins the Pulitzer Prize winning memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank's mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank's father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy—exasperating, irresponsible and beguiling—does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story. Frank lives for his father's tales of Cuchulain, who saved Ireland, and of the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother babies. Perhaps it is story that accounts for Frank's survival. Wearing rags for diapers, begging a pig's head for Christmas dinner and gathering coal from the roadside to light a fire, Frank endures poverty, near-starvation and the casual cruelty of relatives and neighbors—yet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance and remarkable forgiveness. Angela's Ashes, imbued on every page with Frank McCourt's astounding humor and compassion, is a glorious book that bears all the marks of a classic.

    He is determined to prove—to the subway bosses who have recently fired him, to his badgering, pregnant wife—“that the hours of his life belong to himself alone.” In the aftermath of the fire that follows, Sister St. Savior, an aging nun, appears, unbidden, to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child.We begin deep inside Catholic Brooklyn, in the early part of the twentieth century. Decorum, superstition, and shame collude to erase the man’s brief existence. Yet his suicide, although never spoken of, reverberates through many lives and over the decades—testing the limits and the demands of love and sacrifice, of forgiveness and forgetfulness, even through multiple generations.The characters we meet, from Sally, the unborn baby at the beginning of the novel, who becomes the center of the story, to the nuns whose personalities we come to know and love, to the neighborhood families with whose lives they are entwined, are all rendered with extraordinary sympathy and McDermott’s trademark lucidity and intelligence.Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour is a crowning achievement by one of the premiere writers at work in America today.

    With school behind him and a summer job at a brick works, Tom had his whole life before him. Years later, alone in a rented flat in Edinburgh and lost in memories, Tom recalls the intellectual and sexual awakening of his youth. In looking back, Tom discovers that only by understanding where he comes from can he make sense of his life as it is now.

    But the death of her doting guardian leaves Gemma under the care of her resentful aunt, and it soon becomes clear that she is nothing more than an unwelcome guest at Yew House. When she receives a scholarship to a private school, ten-year-old Gemma believes she's found the perfect solution and eagerly sets out again to a new home. However, at Claypoole she finds herself treated as an unpaid servant.To Gemma's delight, the school goes bankrupt, and she takes a job as an au pair on the Orkney Islands. The remote Blackbird Hall belongs to Mr. Sinclair, a London businessman; his eight-year-old niece is Gemma's charge. Even before their first meeting, Gemma is, like everyone on the island, intrigued by Mr. Sinclair. Rich (by Gemma's standards), single, flying in from London when he pleases, Hugh Sinclair fills the house with life. An unlikely couple, the two are drawn to each other, but Gemma's biggest trial is about to begin: a journey of passion and betrayal, redemption and discovery, that will lead her to a life of which she's never dreamed.Set in Scotland and Iceland in the 1950s and '60s, The Flight of Gemma Hardy--a captivating homage to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre--is a sweeping saga that resurrects the timeless themes of the original but is destined to become a classic all its own.

    Walter Macken paints a memorable portrait of the hard life of subsistence farming, of loveless arranged marriages, and of rebellion against suffocating social mores.

    Narrated by a doctor who returns to his old neighborhood for the first time in nearly forty years to attend the funeral of his boyhood parish priest, the story blends hilarious accounts of childhood escapades with the timelessly poignant theme of loss. Reminiscences resonate as the story unfolds, evoking laughter in one moment and tugging on heartstrings the next. Whether you attended Catholic school or merely know someone who did, there is a lot of all of us in the story of Father Tim.

    This is the story of the reign of Kenneth MacAlpin, the 9th-century king who united Scotland and gave it its name.

    Enthralled at first by these strangers, he begins to discover their dark and dangerous side, touching off a decades-long struggle against determined explorers, aggressive traders, land-hungry settlers, and ruthless officials. If his own people are to survive, the boy-turned-man must use his wits, build alliances, and draw on unique skills to block the rising tide of the white "salt people."Ambition and fear, love and loathing, mutual respect and open contempt bring Europeans and "savages" together in the untold story of the founding of New York City and the fabled island at its heart: Manhattan.If you have a passion for the historical fiction of Ken Follett, James Michener, or Edward Rutherfurd, you'll savor this rich and meticulously researched novel.A novel based on true events.(This Omnibus Edition includes updated and revised versions of the four short ebooks in The Manhattan Series plus new added content.)

    But it was years before Dr. Power's cherished only son saw in the huckster's daughter the answer to his own heart's desire. Here in Castlebay, perched precariously on the seaside cliffs, the lines between them were clearly drawn. Clare's only hope is to leave the town where time stopped, propelled by scholarships to Dublin, fueled by her own drive and brilliance, far from the insular, gossipy world of Castlebay and those in its thrall... Angela O'Hara, beautiful, isolated, a teacher trapped in the convent school, who risks everything to help Clare escape... Gerry Doyle, the town charmer who finds in Clare the woman he vows to have at any price... Caroline Nolan, the beautiful, rich outsider who comes to plunder...For Clare, that was before the wild freedom of Dublin, and love. And David.  Before fate drove them back to Castlebay, and the past...

    You won’t find any dazzlingly handsome, wealthy action heroes or beyond belief beauties here, but real characters … hard working, Irish country folk who grow to depend upon each other through a dangerous and oppressive time in Ireland’s history … a time of hardship, fear and persecution.Liam Flynn travels across Tipperary, his destination the shores of Lough Derg, his objective to fulfill a lifelong dream. The perils he encounters on the road are only the beginning for this young itinerant carpenter. He finds himself thrust into an impossible situation when, with the help of an old Franciscan priest, he tries to save the tiny Irish village of Gortalocca. If he is discovered by the authorities, he faces almost certain execution for treason and, when the villagers discover what action he has taken in his efforts to help them, he becomes the object of their contempt and hatred.These are dangerous times in Ireland and, as the country struggles to piece itself back together after a hundred years of conflict, the very fabric of society has changed. English Parliament has begun to impose harsh Penal Laws in Ireland which will ban Catholics from voting, from receiving an education, even from practicing their own faith. Catholics can no longer own their own land. More than ninety percent of Ireland’s land will be confiscated and given to English and Irish Protestant landlords, who will charge the rightful owners rent as they try to eke out a living on land which their families have worked for generations. Liam and Father Grogan risk their lives in an effort to save their peaceful Irish village from dissolution.A consummate loner, Liam has led a solitary life so far but he finds romance in Gortalocca, not with a retiring Irish lass, but rather with the feisty daughter of Michael Hogan, the owner of Gortalocca’s only store and bar. Roisin grew up in a man’s environment and has seen enough to know that she will never wed if it means compromising herself by marrying a man she doesn’t love. Now, at the age of nineteen, Roisin Hogan is a spinster.There is plenty of fast-paced action in our story and villains abound, from Gortalocca’s homegrown bully, Sean Reilly, and his gang of thugs, to the menacing dark man who appears from nowhere, posing a threat to Liam’s plan and adding a further complication to his life.You will meet Moira, the ancient and mysterious old hag who lives alone in a tiny cottage, hidden deep inside the forest. Moira is one of the ‘wise ones’, a healer, with her own blend of the spiritual and the ritualistic, the Christian and the Pagan. She is feared by the villagers who think her a witch and do not dare to gaze upon her … unless one of them is ill, and then she is beckoned for help. Moira becomes the source of wisdom for Liam and a strange and shadowy, yet important, part of the plot.Of course, an Irish story would not be complete without humor, and there is plenty of ‘craic’ to be had here. In Hogan’s bar, you will experience, first hand, the humor which epitomises the character of the people of Ireland, and sustains them, especially in times of crisis … an unconscious humor, one of habit. You will sit at the bar with Paddy Shevlin, the pig farmer and Ben Clancy, the shepherd, whose banter provides a welcome respite from the tension, and who never let the truth spoil a perfectly good story.Allow yourself to be stirred into this cauldron of Irish stew.

    With school over and the locked world of their fathers before them, they rush towards the climax of their youth: a magical weekend in Manchester, the epicentre of everything that inspires them in working-class Britain. There, against the greatest soundtrack ever recorded, a vow is made: to go at life differently. Thirty years on, half a life away, the phone rings. Tully has news.Mayflies is a memorial to youth's euphorias and to everyday tragedy. A tender goodbye to an old union, it discovers the joy and the costs of love.

    She's the one growing up in the mad family, in the mad society, who doesn't want to know what's going on. But things are going on: eight-year-olds collecting very peculiar treasure; babies who might be, or might not be, bombs; schoolgirls bringing guns into schoolyards; and, of course, lots of food and bad, bad sex.If Amelia is to live she needs to change. Can she, though, in a place where people don't know how to look after themselves, and so wouldn't know how to look after one another?The shattering and darkly funny debut novel from the author of Milkman, winner of the Man Booker Prize.

    Among the commoners in the GPO was a young staff captain of the Irish Volunteers named Michael Collins. He was joined a day later by a fourteen-year-old messenger boy, Eoin Kavanagh. Four days later they would all surrender, but they had struck the match that would burn Great Britain out of Ireland for the first time in seven hundred years.The 13th Apostle is the reimagined story of how Michael Collins, along with his young acolyte Eoin, transformed Ireland from a colony into a nation. Collins’s secret weapon was his intelligence system and his assassination squad, nicknamed “The Twelve Apostles.” On November 21, 1920, the squad—with its thirteenth member, young Eoin—assassinated the entire British Secret Service in Dublin. Twelve months and sixteen days later, Collins signed the Treaty at 10 Downing Street, which brought into being what is, today, the Republic of Ireland.An epic novel in the tradition of Thomas Flanagan’s The Year of the French and Leon Uris’s Trinity, The 13th Apostle is a story that will capture the imagination and hearts of freedom-loving readers everywhere.