He will wave goodbye early one morning, then disappear with seven other men to traverse the Irish countryside. Together, these men form The Butchers, a group that roams from farm to farm, enacting ancient methods of cattle slaughter.  The Butchers’ Blessing moves between the events of 1996 and the present, offering a simmering glimpse into the modern tensions that surround these eight fabled men. For Úna, being a Butcher’s daughter means a life of tangled ambition and incredible loneliness. For her mother Grá, it’s a life of faith and longing, of performing a promise that she may or may not be able to keep. For non-believer Fionn, The Butchers represent a dated and complicated reality, though for his son Davey, they represent an entirely new world—and potentially new love. For photographer Ronan, The Butchers are ideal subjects: representatives of an older, more folkloric Ireland whose survival is now being tested. As he moves through the countryside, Ronan captures this world image by image—a lake, a cottage, and his most striking photo: a single butcher, hung upside-down in a pose of unspeakable violence.

    Together they set out to conquer Dublin and the world. Under the big city’s bright lights, they spin their lives into a whirl of comic and touching misadventures, wild flirtations, and reckless passions. But love changes everything. And as their lives take unexpected and separate turns, Baba and Kate must ultimately learn to go it alone.A beautiful portrait of the pain and joy of youth, the ruin of marriage gone wrong, and the ache of lost friendship and love, this trilogy of Edna O’Brien’s remarkable early novels is more than just a harbinger of the stunning and masterly writer she has become.

    Here, and in the towns beyond, the young live hard and wear the scars. Amongst them, there’s jilted Jimmy, whose best friend Tug is the terror of the town and Jimmy’s sole company in his search for the missing Clancy kid; Bat, a lovesick soul with a face like “a bowl of mashed up spuds” even before Nubbin Tansey’s boot kicked it in; and Arm, a young and desperate criminal whose destiny is shaped when he and his partner, Dympna, fail to carry out a job. In each story, a local voice delineates the grittiness of Irish society; unforgettable characters whose psychological complexities and unspoken yearnings are rendered through silence, humor, and violence.With power and originality akin to Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned and Claire Vaye Watkins’ Battleborn these six short stories and one explosive novella occupy the ghostly, melancholic spaces between boyhood and old age. Told in Barrett’s vibrant, distinctive prose, Young Skins is an accomplished and irreverent debut from a brilliant new writer.

    With a cast of characters that ranges from hip-hop-loving fourteen-year-old Eoin "MC Sexecutioner” Flynn to basketball-playing midget Philip Kilfether, packed with questions and answers on everything from Ritalin, to M-theory, to bungee jumping, to the hidden meaning of the poetry of Robert Frost, Skippy Dies is a heartfelt, hilarious portrait of the pain, joy, and occasional beauty of adolescence, and a tragic depiction of a world always happy to sacrifice its weakest members. As the twenty-first century enters its teenage years, this is a breathtaking novel from a young writer who will come to define his generation.

    His job in a bank puts him next to, but not in possession of, money. As a clerk he learns the principles of Double-Entry Bookkeeping and adapts them in his own dramatic fashion to settle his personal account with society.Under the column headed 'Aggravation' for offences received from society (unpleasantness of Bank Manager; general diminution of life caused by advertising), debit Christie; under 'Recompense' for offences given back to society (general removal of items of stationery; Pork Pie Purveyors Ltd. bomb hoax), credit Christie. All accounts are to be settled in full, and they are - in the most alarming way.B.S. Johnson was one of Britain's most original writers and Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry is his funniest book.

    Samuel Szajkowski, a recently hired history teacher, walked into a school assembly with a gun and murdered three students and a colleague before turning the weapon on himself. It was a tragedy that could not have been predicted. Szajkowski, it seems clear, was a psychopath beyond help. Yet as Detective Inspector Lucia May- the only woman in her high-testosterone office in the Criminal Investigations Department-begins to piece together the testimonies of the various witnesses, an uglier and more complex picture emerges, calling into question the innocence of others. But no one, including Lucia's boss, is interested. As the pressure to close the case builds and her colleagues' sexism takes a sinister turn, Lucia begins to realize that she has more in common with the killer than she could have imagined, and she becomes deter­mined to expose the truth. Brilliantly interweaving the witnesses' accounts with Lucia's own perspective, A Thousand Cuts is a narrative tour de force from a formidable new voice in fiction.

    A series of brutal murders has occurred, and, as Ackroyd leads us down London's dark streets, the sense of time and place becomes overwhelmingly immediate and real. We experience the sights and sounds of the English music halls, smell the smells of London slums, hear the hooves of horses on the cobblestone streets, and attend the trial of Elizabeth Cree, a woman accused of poisoning her husband but who may be the one person who knows the truth about the murders.

    Isolated by religion and circumstance, she endures both an abusive husband and a strained relationship with her son, Martin, whose open homosexuality her husband refused to accept. After an act of desperation, reeling with doubt and denial, she seeks out her son in Dublin. Keith Ridgway "affectingly renders the separate sanctuaries of mother and son . . .and lights the distance between them" (The New Yorker).

    Cain's first novel - the subject of an obscenity trial in Boston and the inspiration for Camus's The Stranger - is the fever-pitched tale of a drifter who stumbles into a job, into an erotic obsession, and into a murder.

    A teenage girl has gone missing. Everyone is called upon to join the search. The villagers fan out across the moors as the police set up roadblocks and a crowd of news reporters descends on what is usually a place of peace. Meanwhile, there is work that must still be done: cows milked, fences repaired, stone cut, pints poured, beds made, sermons written, a pantomime rehearsed. As the seasons unfold and the search for the missing girl goes on, there are those who leave the village and those who are pulled back; those who come together and those who break apart. There are births and deaths; secrets kept and exposed; livelihoods made and lost; small kindnesses and unanticipated betrayals. An extraordinary novel of cumulative power and grace, Reservoir 13 explores the rhythms of the natural world and the repeated human gift for violence, unfolding over thirteen years as the aftershocks of a tragedy refuse to subside.

    Every night, on the point of losing his mind, he drowns their screams in drink. His solution is to kill those who engineered their deaths.From the greedy politicians to the corrupt security forces, the street thugs to the complacent bystanders who let it happen, all are called to account. But when Fegan's vendetta threatens to derail a hard-won truce and destabilise the government, old comrades and enemies alike want him dead.Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Thriller.

    Eileen O'Neill's family is torn apart by religious intolerance and secrets from the past. Determined to reclaim her ancestral home and reunite her family, Eileen begins working at the local mill.

    Broken bowls, belligerent cows, swanky aubergines, trembling moonrises and horrifying sunsets, the physical world depicted in these stories is unsettling yet intimately familiar and soon takes on a life of its own. Captivated by the stellar charms of seclusion but restless with desire, the woman’s relationship with her surroundings becomes boundless and increasingly bewildering. Claire-Louise Bennett’s startlingly original first collection slips effortlessly between worlds and is by turns darkly funny and deeply moving.

    Here is the incredible story of an imprisoned pedophile who is drawn into an erotically charged correspondence with a nineteen-year-old suburban coed. As the two reveal—and revel in—their obsessive desires, Homes creates in The End of Alice a novel that is part romance, part horror story, at once unnerving and seductive.

    He disappeared on the very day they were to be married. It's a challenge Holmes can't turn down.This is #3 in Doyle's first collection of Holmes' short stories, "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes."Librarian's note: this entry is for the story, "A Case of Identity." Collections of short stories by the author can be found elsewhere.