Book picks similar to
Donegal Fairy Stories by Seumas MacManus


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Nocturne


Kat Ross - 2017
    With the memories of her former self erased and nowhere else to turn, she comes to Nocturne hoping to start a new life under the triple moons of the darklands.But when an assassin forces Nazafareen to flee to the sunlit mortal city of Delphi, she finds herself embroiled in a deeper mystery whose origins lie far in the past. Why was the continent sundered into light and dark a thousand years before? And what really happened to the elegant but ruthless creatures who nearly reduced the world to ashes? The new Oracle might know, but she’s outlawed magic and executes anyone caught practicing it. Nazafareen must hide her powers and find a way out of the city—before it’s too late.As the net slowly tightens, something ancient and vengeful begins to stir in the arid death zone called the Kiln. A dashing daeva named Darius is pursuing Nazafareen, but so are a multitude of enemies. War is brewing again. Can she stay alive long enough to stop it?So begins the first installment of an epic new fantasy series from the author of the Fourth Element Trilogy!

Pegasus


Danielle Steel - 2014
    and the magnificent stallion that will link them forever. Nicolas von Bingen and Alex von Hemmerle, titled members of the German aristocracy, have been best friends since childhood. Both widowers, they are raising their children — Nick’s two lively boys and Alex’s adored teenage daughter — in peace and luxury on the vast Bavarian estates that have belonged to their families for generations. While Nick indulges in more glamorous pursuits, Alex devotes himself to breeding the renowned white Lipizzaner horses that enthrall audiences throughout Europe with their ability to dance and spin on command, majestic creatures whose bloodlines are rare and priceless. But it is Nicolas’s bloodline that changes everything, when his father receives a warning from a high-ranking contact inside the Wehrmacht. A secret from the past has left the family vulnerable to the rising tide of Nazism: Nick’s mother, whom he never knew, was of Jewish descent. Suddenly Nicolas must flee Germany, wrenching his sons away from the only home they have known, sailing across the Atlantic for a new life in America. Their survival will depend on a precious gift from Alex, their only stake for the future: eight purebred horses, two of them stunning Lipizzaners. In Florida, where Nicolas joins the Ringling Brothers Circus, he becomes Nick Bing, with Alex’s prize white stallion — now named Pegasus — the centerpiece of the show. Pegasus tells the story of a family reinventing itself in America, while the country they left behind is engulfed in flames and madness, and men like Alex von Hemmerle are forced to make unbearable choices. Alex’s daughter will find sanctuary in England. In America, Nick will find love, his sons will find a future, and their left-behind world will eventually find them. A novel of hope and sacrifice, of tragedy, challenge, and rebirth, It is a brilliant family chronicle that unfolds across half a century—a masterwork from one of our most beloved writers.

The Agony of Jesus


Padre Pio - 1974
    One of his few writings, the booklet also includes many pictures of Blessed Padre Pio from throughout his ministry. Padre Pio's beautiful and descriptive manner of writing provide a wonderful spiritual insight into that last night of Jesus' human life.

The Soldier's Song


Alan Monaghan - 2010
    As Ireland stands on the brink of political crisis, Europe plunges headlong into war. Among the thousands of Irishmen who volunteer to fight for the British Army is Stephen Ryan, a gifted young maths scholar whose working class background has marked him out as a misfit among his wealthy fellow students. Sent to fight in Turkey, he looks forward to the great adventure, unaware of the growing unrest back home in Ireland. His romantic notions of war are soon shattered and he is forced to wonder where his loyalties lie, on his return to a Dublin poised for rebellion in 1916 and a brother fighting for the rebels. Everything has changed utterly, and in a world gone mad his only hope is his growing friendship with the brilliant and enigmatic Lillian Bryce. "The Soldier's Song "is a poignant and deeply moving novel, a tribute to the durability of the human soul.

Those Are Real Bullets: Bloody Sunday, Derry, 1972


Peter Pringle - 2000
    Five were shot in the back. A major turning point in the recent history of Northern Ireland, the massacre galvanized Catholics in their struggle against the British presence in Ulster. In Those Are Real Bullets, Peter Pringle and Philip Jacobson provide the definitive, full-length narrative account of Bloody Sunday. Using extensive interviews and recently declassified documents unavailable for previous books about the shootings, they vividly re-create the chaos and terror of the day and capture the full human impact of the tragedy. Those Are Real Bullets provides an intimate portrait of a city in revolt and the climax of a failed military response that plunged Northern Ireland into three decades of armed conflict. "A shocking, stomach-turning, enraging narrative history that should be required reading." -- Irish Independent "Written by two veteran, first-rate reporters, this book will remain the standard account of that miserable day." -- Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Daily Mail

Hoolifan: 30 Years of Hurt


Martin King - 1999
    He describes the leading characters, famous fights, and planned ambushes, and sets hooliganism in its social context.Hoolifan is the story of one man, Martin King, and his experiences spanning three decades with the country's foremost soccer gang. Chelsea have always been at the cutting edge of football violence, and King himself has been at the heart of the evolving Chelsea mob for most of those 30 years. From his first visit to a football ground in the early-1960s, he charts his development from a rattle-waving child, through to a fully fledged member of the notorious Chelsea Shed in the 1970s, and finally to his exploits as a key player in the most feared football gang of the 1980s and 1990s - the so-called Chelsea Headhunters.King describes the leading characters of the various eras, not just from Chelsea but from across the country. He also records every clash, ambush and act of revenge in vivid detail, as well as the camaraderie and style of this most infamous soccer gang.This is not just another book on the well-trodden subject of football hooliganism as, unlike previous authors, Martin King makes no attempt to distance himself from the violence and leaves the reader to draw his own conclusions.At times provocative, often humorous and always honest, Hoolifon is destined to do more to place the phenomenon of football hooliganism in its true social context than any previous work.

Tales of a Chinese Grandmother: 30 Traditional Tales from China


Frances Carpenter - 1937
    These classic stories represent the best of the Chinese folk tradition and are told here by the character Lao Lao, the beloved grandmother of the nineteenth-century Ling household. A sampling from a long and proud tradition, these Chinese folktales are sure to delight adults as well as children of all ages. Chinese children's stories include:How Pan Ku Made the WorldThe God that Lived in the KitchenThe Daughter of the Dragon KingThe Grateful Fox FairyThe King of the MonkeysThe Wonderful Pear TreeKo-Ai's Lost ShoeHeng O, the Moon LadyThe Old Old One's Birthday

Brooklyn


Colm Tóibín - 2009
    Though skilled at bookkeeping, she cannot find a job in the miserable Irish economy. When an Irish priest from Brooklyn offers to sponsor Eilis in America--to live and work in a Brooklyn neighborhood "just like Ireland"--she decides she must go, leaving her fragile mother and her charismatic sister behind.Eilis finds work in a department store on Fulton Street, and when she least expects it, finds love. Tony, a blond Italian from a big family, slowly wins her over with patient charm. He takes Eilis to Coney Island and Ebbets Field, and home to dinner in the two-room apartment he shares with his brothers and parents. He talks of having children who are Dodgers fans. But just as Eilis begins to fall in love with Tony, devastating news from Ireland threatens the promise of her future.

Rebel Hearts: Journeys Within the IRA's Soul


Kevin Toolis - 1995
    His journeys took him from the back kitchens of Belfast, where men joked while making two-thousand-pound bombs, to prisons for interviews with men serving life sentences, and to the graveyards where mourners weep. Each chapter explores a world where history, faith, and human savagery determine life and death. At once moving and harrowing, Rebel Hearts is the most authoritative and insightful book ever written on the IRA.

The Walking People


Mary Beth Keane - 2009
    Fifty years later, when the Ireland of her memory bears little resemblance to that of present day, she fears that it is still possible to lose all when she discovers that her children—with the best of intentions— have conspired to unite the worlds she’s so carefully kept separate for decades.A beautifully old-fashioned novel, The Walking People is a debut of remarkable range and power.

The Weir and Other Plays


Conor McPherson - 1999
    collection of an extraordinary new voice in Irish drama.

The 13th Apostle: A Novel of a Dublin Family, Michael Collins, and the Irish Uprising


Dermot McEvoy - 2014
    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.

Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme


Frank McGuinness - 1986
    follows the experience of eight men who volunteer to serve in the 36th (Ulster) Division at the beginning of the First World War. It reaches a climax at the start of the terrible battle of the Somme on July 1, 1916, the actual anniversary of the battle of the Boyne in 1690. The Somme, where the Ulster Division suffered heavy casualties, has, like the Boyne, come to have a sacred place in the Loyalist Protestant mind. It marks the Union sealed with blood. It stands for the ultimate test of Ulster's loyalty; a blood-sacrifice to match any made by Irish nationalists.' Times Literary SupplementObserve the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme was revived by the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in 1994 as part of an acknowledgement of the peace process. The production was subsequently taken to the Edinburgh Festival in 1995 and opened at the Royal Shakespeare Company's Barbican Theatre, London, in March 1996.

Oh My God, What a Complete Aisling


Emer McLysaght - 2017
    Aisling. She lives at home in Ballygobbard (or Ballygobackwards, as some gas tickets call it) with her parents and commutes to her good job at PensionsPlus in Dublin.Aisling goes out every Saturday night with her best friend Majella, who is a bit of a hames (she’s lost two phones already this year – Aisling has never lost a phone). Aisling spends two nights a week at her boyfriend John’s. He’s from down home and was kiss number seventeen at her twenty-first.But Aisling wants more. She wants the ring on her finger. She wants the hen with the willy straws. She wants out of her parents’ house, although she’d miss Mammy turning on the electric blanket like clockwork and Daddy taking her car 'out for a spin' and bringing it back full of petrol.When a week in Tenerife with John doesn’t end with the expected engagement, Aisling calls a halt to things and soon she has surprised herself and everyone else by agreeing to move into a three-bed in Portobello with stylish Sadhbh from HR and her friend, the mysterious Elaine. Newly single and relocated to the big city, life is about to change utterly for this wonderful, strong, surprising and funny girl, who just happens to be a complete Aisling. Emer McLysaght and Sarah Breen, the creators of the much-loved Aisling character and the popular Facebook page 'Oh My God, What a Complete Aisling', bring Aisling to life in their novel about the quintessential country girl in the big smoke.

George Washington's Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior: And Other Writings


George Washington - 2008
    . .nor with mouth open; go not upon the toes nor in a dancing fashion." George Washington was known as a remarkably modest and courteous man. Humility and flawless manners were so ingrained in his character that he rarely if ever acted without them. The "Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior" that governed Washington's etiquette were by turns practical, inspirational and curious. These rules are as instructive and invaluable today as they were hundreds of years ago. George Washington's Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior includes the complete text of the rules, as well as famous Washington writings such as: -Farewell to the Armies speech-Inaugural Address-Retirement Address-Address at the End of His Presidency