A couple drive out to the hills in a last-ditch effort to save their marriage. A horse crashes a house party. Set on an imagined island off the west coast of Ireland, John Patrick McHugh’s debut collection of stories draw a complete community of characters – misdirected, posturing and self-deceiving. But in his fidelity to and compassion for their faults, McHugh embeds us in the moments on which these lives twist and turn, probing unflinchingly what most of us would rather ignore. Pure Gold heralds the arrival of a vibrant new literary voice.

    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.

    But Donn longs for a wider kingdom. He deserts his bride, roams the world, fights in wars, is footloose - yet finds that he is homesick. Sixteen years later he returns to take up the threads of his old life, to learn to love his afflicted daughter, and to bring progress to the neglected green valley. Light comes, water flows, the land prospers. Then, on a night of innocent festivity, a monstrous crime is perpetrated. His kingdom violated, Donn dedicates himself to a terrible revenge that can only destroy the avenger as well as the hunted

    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.

    Author of the New York Times bestsellers “Let the Great World Spin” and “Transatlantic,” McCann has been called “a giant among us” (Peter Carey), “dazzlingly talented” (O: The Oprah Magazine), and “that rare species in contemporary fiction: a literary writer who is an exceptional storyteller” (The Independent). He’s received a National Book Award, an Oscar nomination, and a slew of international prizes. His talents are on full display in his new short story, “Gone,” a deeply affecting literary thriller about a mother and son, alone in a cottage on the west coast of Ireland, and the search that ensues when the boy—whom she adopted years before, deaf and with “already a whole history written in him”—goes missing. He slips away in early morning, down to the cold sea with his new Christmas wetsuit, and as the hours and days drag on, the coast guard, police, dogs, fishermen, farmers, and schoolchildren holding hands search the sea and walk the fields while the television crews and detectives come and go, the police at the cottage seeming to “ghost into one another: almost as if they could slip into one another’s faces.” The mother, Rebecca, now under suspicion, is racked with guilt over the decisions that led to her son’s disappearance, and tormented by the judgment of others: "You bought what? A wetsuit? Why in the world? What sort of mother? How much wine did you drink?" For Rebecca, “every outcome was unwhisperable.” “Gone” is a charged narrative that propels you forward, heart in your throat, and a moving, intimate look at life’s struggles toward grace and a kind of redemption.

    In the breathtaking long story “The Street,” Tóibín imagines a relationship between Pakistani workers in Barcelona—a taboo affair in a community ruled by obedience and silence. In “Two Women,” an eminent and taciturn Irish set designer takes a job in her homeland, and must confront emotions she has long repressed. “Silence” is a brilliant historical set piece about Lady Gregory, who tells the writer Henry James a confessional story at a dinner party.Silence --The empty family --Two women --One minus one --The pearl fishers --Barcelona, 1975 --The new Spain --The colour of shadows --The street

    In the strangers’ house, she finds a warmth and affection she has not known before and slowly begins to blossom in their care. And then a secret is revealed and suddenly, she realizes how fragile her idyll is.Winner of the Davy Byrnes Memorial Prize, Foster is now published in a revised and expanded version. Beautiful, sad and eerie, it is a story of astonishing emotional depth, showcasing Claire Keegan’s great accomplishment and talent.

    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.

    With Town and Country: New Irish Short Stories, edited by Kevin Barry, Faber are delighted to present a fourth collection of all new Irish short stories.Edited by award winning novelist and short story writer Kevin Barry, this volume will once again mix established names with previously unpublished authors, and will seek to offer fresh renditions to the Irish story - new angles, new approaches, new modes of attack.Published in 2011, New Irish Short Stories, edited by Joseph O'Connor, has sold over 10,000 copies to date and featured Kevin Barry's 'Beer Trip to Llandudno' - winner of the 2012 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Prize - as well as stories by William Trevor, Dermot Bolger and Roddy Doyle which went on to be Afternoon Readings on BBC Radio 4.

    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.

    It’s the only place left to goWhen Marianne’s carefully constructed life and marriage fall apart, she is forced to return to Ancaire, the ramshackle seaside house perched high on a cliff by the Irish Sea. There she must rebuild her relationship with her mother, Rita, a flamboyant artist and recovering alcoholic who lives by her own rules.Marianne left home when she was fifteen following a traumatic and tragic incident. She never planned to return, and now she has to face the fact that some plans don’t work out the way you wanted them to. But she might just discover that, sometimes, you have to come to terms with the story of your past before you can work out the shape of the future…Set on the wild Irish coast, with an unforgettable cast of characters, this deeply emotional novel is full of Ciara Geraghty’s trademark heart and poignancy.

    Witty, informative, and with a touch of romance, The Tour offers a unique look at the lives of others amidst the Emerald Isle. Safe at the Edge of the WorldWhen a shadowy couple turn up on Conor O’Shea’s grand tour of Ireland, the tranquility of Ireland’s landscape acts as a shelter against the stormy reality of the life they left behind.On the run from a notorious mob boss, this mysterious couple flees the U.S. in search of sanctuary on the shores of the Emerald Isle, hoping to blend in with the tourists. In their wake lies a mafia family’s secrets and a scarred priest torn between his duty to the cloth and to the truth.Intriguing and uniquely consuming, Father Declan Sullivan’s tale of destiny and duty lies at the feet of those he has betrayed. Can distance and deliverance save the innocent in their desperate pursuit for peace, or will evil catch up to them all?In Safe at the Edge of the World, author Jean Grainger captures the soothing beauty of Ireland in the lives of those fleeing a criminal bent on revenge. The Story of Grenville KingConor O’Shea has had enough of driving and guiding tours of Ireland.So when an opportunity to renovate and run the magnificent but rundown Castle Dysert as a five-star resort presents itself, he grabs it with both hands.But problems arise almost immediately when his business partner appears to have more on her agenda than just business.To add to that, his darling wife seems discontented as a stay at home mom, and his in-laws have moved in. With his family’s future now entangled in a stunningly beautiful old castle on the coast of Clare, Conor undertakes a mammoth project, and in so doing, he uncovers the troubled past of this ancient stronghold. The mystery of the family who lived, loved, and lost their lives within the walls of the castle are reflected in his own family as they too struggle to let go of the past.Like in every small Irish village, gossip abounds. But do the ghosts of regret still haunt these ancient hallways? It is now left to Conor to explore the truth and uncover a heartbreaking lesson on the power of memory and the long threads that bind us together.In The Story of Grenville King, Jean Grainger takes you once again to the real heart of Ireland.

    It’s the bloodiest year of the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’ and sixteen-year-old Eimear O’Callaghan, a Catholic schoolgirl in Andersonstown, West Belfast, bears witness in her new diary. What follows is a unique and touching perspective into the daily life of an ordinary teenager coming of age in extraordinary times. The immediacy of the diary entries are complemented with the author’s mature reflections written forty years later. The result is poignant, shocking, wryly funny and above all, explicitly honest.This unique publication comes at a time when Northern Ireland is desperately struggling to come to terms with the legacy of its turbulent past. It provides a powerful juxtaposition of the ordinary, everyday concerns of a sixteen-year-old girl – who could be any girl in any British or Irish city at this time, worrying about her hair, exams, clothes, discos – with the unimaginable horror of a society slowly disintegrating before her eyes, a seemingly inevitable descent into a bloody civil war, fuelled by sectarianism, hatred and fear.Written by an experienced broadcaster and journalist, Belfast Days demonstrates how one person’s examination of her own ‘story’, upon rediscovering her 1972 diary on the eve of the publication of the Saville Report, provided her with a new perspective on one of the darkest periods in twentieth century British and Irish history.

    From one of Ireland’s most grindingly authentic and radically original talents, Room Little Darker explores the clandestine aspects of modern life through jagged, visceral tales of wanton sex, broken relationships, homelessness and futuristic nightmares.An abusive father haunts his daughter and wife from the confines of a nursing home; a couple with an appetite for kink discover their escapades have led them into something unimaginably grim; an addict makes his way around a city centre crackling with menace; an unborn child narrates her own tragic story; a paedophile acquires a sex therapy robot and wonders how they’ll get along.At once hilarious and profoundly moving, June Caldwell’s stories probe raw sexuality and disturbing psychology, the love (and hate) of family, the darkness and light that lives inside us all.

    McGahern's short stories equal his finest novels, reflecting both the richness of the ordinary, and the extraordinary, in the lives of a variety of individuals: the jilted lover waiting with would-be writers in a Dublin pub on a summer evening; the bitter climax between a father and son as a marriage begins; the fortunes and misfortunes of the Kirkwood family; and many more.For this revised edition, completed shortly before his death, John McGahern edited and deleted a number of stories from the Collected Stories that first appeared in 1992. This is the authorised edition of a modern classic.