The Night of the Party


Rachael English - 2018
    By the end of the night, the parish priest, Father Leo Galvin, is dead.The lives of four teenagers - Tom, Conor, Tess and Nina - who had been drinking beer and smoking in a shed at the back of the house, will never be the same. But one of them carries a secret from that night that he has never shared. The friends go on to lead very different, separate lives - some quiet, others in the media spotlight - but the four remain connected by what happened during the time of the big snow.As the thirty-fifth anniversary of Father Galvin's murder approaches, Conor, now a senior police officer, becomes obsessed with the crime his father failed to solve. He believes that Tom can help identify Father Galvin's killer. But does Tom wish to break his silence? His dilemma draws the four friends back together, forcing them to question their lives and to confront their differences. But only Tom can decide whether Kilmitten's secret will finally be revealed.

That Childhood Country


Deirdre Purcell - 1992
    A young man and woman 's passionate beginnings are ruined by a terrible secret that their parents buried for nearly two decades.

Cheating at Canasta


William Trevor - 2007
    Trevor's last collection, A Bit on the Side, was named a New York Times Notable Book and hailed as one of the Best Books of the Year by papers from coast to coast, including The Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle. And his earlier collection, After Rain, published in 1996, was named one of the eight best books of the year by The New York Times. Trevor's precise and unflinching insights into the hearts and lives of ordinary people are evidenced once again in this stunning new collection. From a chance encounter between two childhood friends to the memories of a newly widowed man to a family grappling with the sale of their ancestral land, Trevor examines with grace and skill the tenuous bonds of our relationships, the strengths that hold us together, and the truths that threaten to separate us. Subtle yet powerful, his stories linger with the reader long after the words have been put away. These twelve exquisitely nuanced tales of regret, deception, adultery, aging, and forgiveness confirm Trevor's reputation as a master of the form and one of literature's preeminent chroniclers of the human condition.

I Wrote This for You: Just the Words


Iain S. Thomas - 2018
    While focusing on the words from the project, new photography launches each section which speaks to the reader's journey through the world: Love Found, Being In Love, Love Lost, Hope, Despair, Living and Dying.

Season of Second Chances


Aimee Alexander - 2020
    A novel of family, love, and learning to be kind to yourself by award-winning, bestselling Irish author, Aimee Alexander. Grace Sullivan flees Dublin with her two teenage children, Jack and Holly, returning to the sleepy West Cork village where she grew up. No one in Killrowan knows what Grace is running from - or that she's even running. She'd like to keep it that way. Taking over from her father, Des, as the village doctor offers a real chance for Grace to begin again. But will she and the family adapt to life in a small rural community? Will the villagers accept an outsider as their GP? Will Grace live up to the doctor that her father was? And will she find the inner strength to face the past when it comes calling? Season of Second Chances is a heart-warming story of friendship, love and finding the inner strength to face a future that may bring back the past. Perfect for fans of Call The Midwives, The Durrells, Doc Martin and All Creatures Great and Small. The villagers of Killrowan will steal into your heart and make you want to stay with them forever.

Child of Sin


Meg Hutchinson - 2000
    If it weren't for loyal Debbie, who follows her friend into exile, Lizzie would be friendless as well as destitute.The girls are blessed when they meet big-hearted Sadie Trent, who takes them in and cherishes them like her own. But even Sadie cannot protect the girls from the vicious malice of Abe Turley, who is determined to take his pleasure - and then his revenge; and from sinister Fleur Masson, who hides an evil trade behind the respectable facade of a fashion house. After such tribulations, can there ever be true happiness for a child of sin?

Saturday's Child


Ruth Hamilton - 2002
    Magsy O’Gara, her husband killed in the war, plodded through her daily routine as a hospital cleaner, dedicating all her spare time to Beth, her genius daughter. Pursued by men who admired her great beauty, she was determined to remain a widow. Nothing was to divert her from her gruelling schedule. Her goal was simple: Beth would become a doctor.Beth, however, wanted a normal life – a brother, a sister, a stepfather who might make her wonderful mother happy. So Beth was delighted when a personable man began to court Magsy.Across, the road at number 1, Nellie Hulme, trapped in a world of silence, watched the other two Saturday girls. Deaf since infancy, Nellie had a secret so huge that it amused her. What would folk have thought had they known her true position in life? And why did she ‘hear’ in her dreams?

One Step Forward


Rosie Harris - 2003
    Life is hard for Katie - not only because of their poverty but also because of the stigma of her father's shame.When Lewis is released years later, it seems that life must improve. But to Katie's horror, it becomes worse than she has ever known it. When she and her father are left alone together, Katie seeks happiness and love elsewhere, but as she struggles to make a new life for herself, there is difficulty and danger at every turn ...

Three Little Words


Joan Jonker - 2004
    And, as always, they're keeping an eye on their children and grandchildren who mean the world to them. But they're never too busy to help out a friend, so when Claire Thompson attracts a mysterious admirer it's clear to Molly and Nellie that their detective skills are required...

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.

Cradle of Thorns


Josephine Cox - 1997
    But for all her aunt's spiteful attempts to break Nell's independent spirit, she has never succeeded. But now Nell, pregnant and alone, is forced to leave behind the men in her life, believing she might never be able to return.With little but the clothes she wears, she travels across the Bedfordshire countryside of 1890. When she encounters a scruffy urchin called Kit, a ten-year-old orphan who's lived his whole life on the streets, she takes him under her wing. The pair become devoted friends, never knowing where their journey will take them, but each aware that the time will come when there must be a reckoning.

Charlie the Kitten Who Saved A Life


Sheila Norton - 2016
    Perfect for fans of A Streetcat Named Bob and Alfie the Doorstep Cat.But what could I do? I was just a little cat and nobody ever listened to me. I made a promise to myself that I’d do everything I possibly could to save her, whatever the danger to me, and no matter how many lives I lost in the process...Charlie the kitten would do anything for his human. Having just recovered from a debilitating illness, eleven-year-old Caroline isn’t feeling her best, and the arrival of a new baby only makes her feel even more left out.So when Caroline decides to run away, Charlie follows, vowing to protect her at all costs. But for such a little kitten, it’s a big and scary world outside the comfort of the cottage – how far will he go to save his greatest friend?

Callous


Ken Bruen - 2021
    Kate Mitchell’s in the process of kicking her heroin addiction—with the help of alcohol—when a letter arrives informing her that her aunt in Ireland has passed away and bequeathed her a home near the ocean. This could be the start of a new and better life for Kate, far away from Brooklyn, where she and her surviving brothers are each struggling with their own dark pasts. But Aunt Mary didn’t die peacefully—quite the opposite. The pair of thugs responsible for her murder had plans for her house: namely, turning it into a lovely seaside meth lab. One of Mary’s killers, however, finds his focus shifting when he spots a photo of the dead woman’s American niece, who bears a striking resemblance to the late opera singer Maria Callas, the beloved object of his obsession. When Kate and her brothers arrive to claim her inheritance, they’re going to find something other than a piece of paradise . . . “Nobody writes like Ken Bruen, with his ear for lilting Irish prose and his taste for the kind of gallows humor heard only at the foot of the gallows.” —The New York Times “Bruen has a rich and mordant writing style, full of offbeat humor.” —Publishers Weekly

The Wisdom of the Heart


Henry Miller - 1941
    Writing “from the heart,” always with a refreshing lack of reticence, Miller involves the reader directly in his thoughts and feelings. “His real aim,” Karl Shapiro has written, “is to find the living core of our world whenever it survives and in whatever manifestation, in art, in literature, in human behavior itself. It is then that he sings, praises, and shouts at the top of his lungs with the uncontainable hilarity he is famous for.”Here are some of Henry Miller’s best-known writings: an essay on the photographer Brassai; Reflections on Writing, in which Miller examines his own position as a writer; Seraphita and Balzac and His Double, on the works of other writers; and The Alcoholic Veteran, Creative Death, The Enormous Womb, and The Philosopher Who Philosophizes.

Terminus


Mark O'Rowe - 2007
    Hold tight as the ordinary turns extraordinary in Mark O’Rowe’s exhilarating new play. A blackly comic vision of Dublin infested with demons, from the author of Howie the Rookie.