But a chance encounter leads him to a series of adventures on home surf. As he visits the popular haunts and secret gems of British surfing he meets the Christians who pray for waves (and get them), loses a competition to a non–existent surfer, is nearly drowned in the River Severn, and has a watery encounter with a pedigree sheep. All this rekindles his love affair with the freezing fun that is surfing the North Atlantic.

    Victoria Goulding, a Protestant, falls in love with Canice Meagher, born on the Blasket Islands and a Roman Catholic. To be together they must elope. Before their escape, the hand of fate plays its cards and changes their lives irrevocably.Sixty-three years later, in the leafy suburbs of New York, Edith Goulding, Victoria’s sister, has died. Edith left Ireland in the winter of 1955 all those years ago, never to return. In her will she has insisted that her daughter Catherine and granddaughter Lainey visit Kilbride.Kilbride House, despite all its grandeur, holds shocking memories within its walls – memories that have slipped through the cracks of time. As the ghosts awaken the lies begin to unravel, and everything is altered. The past cannot remain untold.

    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.

    In the late 1960s, in the hollow of an ancient oak tree beyond a derelict cottage in Cork, were found the bones of a three-year-old girl. It was thought that they dated back to the time of the great potato famine of the mid 1800s. The bones were discovered by an American woman, who had inherited the cottage which had lain empty and broken for forty years. Local searches reveal that the house had originally belonged to The Quinns. Eliza Quinn was their baby.This is a story that speaks of generations and of landscapes: abandoned villages, famine graves, old potato ridges sinking back into the earth, traces of a population that fell by two and a half million in less than ten years. It is also about hunger, both physical and emotional. But above all, it is the story of the Quinn family. And it is Carol Birch's tour de force.'Deeply rooted humanity and highly intelligent understanding of the simulataneous complexity and simplicity of individual lives' Alex Clark. TLS

    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.

    This is the story of Harry McKee – sleazy local chat show host. A once loving husband, he’s become a drunken unfaithful slob and even his kids won’t speak to him. His wife is divorcing him and taking him to the cleaners. On his last night as a married man he winds up drunk and is beaten up. When he keels over the next day at the divorce hearing his wife and solicitor assume he’s pulling a fast one. He eventually wakes from a week-long coma but he’s lost his memory – everything since 1974. Inside his sagging middle-aged body he feels eighteen. Though he doesn’t know it yet, Harry has been given the chance to get back his life, his wife and his self-respect. If only he could remember how it all went wrong and why his family hate him. As the pieces of his past slowly begin to fall into place we watch Harry attempt to persuade Ruth to fall in love with him all over again, and witness his failure to resurrect his career. Clinging on to the past, he at least still fits into his teenage tank-top and flares – but he’s only got two weeks until the next divorce hearing, when he will be homeless, childless and clueless!

    This book offers a history of Boston's Irish community.

    As the Protestant-Irish emerge from the postwar years, the refuse to face the inevitable: They have beautiful old houses, but can scarcely afford to heat them; eat meals on exquisitely set tables, while the roof leaks; and talk very seriously about the importance of making suitable marriages.When Molly flees the genteel poverty of Ireland for London of the 1960s, she must balance the allure of the new against the romance of a world that no longer exists.

    When they are thrown together in a Dublin brothel in a horrific twist of fate, a peculiar and important bond is formed . . .This is a novel about a flourishing but hidden world, thinly concealed beneath a veneer of normality. It’s about the failings of polite society, the cruelty that can exist in apparently homely surroundings, the bluster of youth and the often appalling weakness of adults.Harvesting is heartbreaking and funny, gritty, raw and breathtakingly beautiful, where redemption is found in friendship and unexpected acts of kindness.Harvesting was inspired by Harding’s involvement with a campaign against sex trafficking run by the Children’s Rights Alliance. Although it is a fictionalised account, the text has been read and approved of by representatives for NGOs in both Moldova and Dublin.

    The botched parliament at Stormont lumbers from crisis to crisis and has scarcely passed any laws. At the time of writing, Sinn Féin and the DUP are refusing to share power and Northern Ireland is facing being run directly from London.This remarkable book examines power-sharing and the peace process in Northern Ireland on the twentieth anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement and asks what it has achieved beyond an end to violence. She concludes that, although it brought an end to violent blood shed on Northern Ireland's streets, it also failed to create healthy and functional politics.The Good Friday Agreement served an important purpose in 1998, but has since been out-paced by local and global politics. It is no longer fit to facilitate the peaceful politics it made possible, as the current collapse of power-sharing sadly shows.

    She's only 28, for heaven's sake, so why does she feel 101?

    Her tales of childhood in rural Ireland hark back to a timeless past, to a world now lost, but ever and fondly remembered. The colorful characters and joyous moments she offers have made her stories an Irish phenomenon, and have made Alice herself the most beloved author in all of the Emerald Isle.

    Peppered with dark humour, this book tells Tommy's story from fending for himself as the runt of a big Catholic litter in the 1960s to driving for a deluded billionaire madman and then gun-toting Mexicans in the 1990s.

    Callcentre worker. Young father. Danny’s not entirely happy with his life. He finds himself tortured by the "what ifs", and by one in particular – what if his casual girlfriend hadn’t told him she was pregnant before he finished his university degree? What if, out of some sense of decency and not wanting to be like his own father, he hadn’t “done the right thing” and dropped out to support her and the baby?When Danny comes home from work after a particularly bad day to find his girlfriend and baby son have vanished, Marie Celeste like, into thin air, it begins a series of events that quickly moves beyond a simple missing persons case. Danny begins to uncover the Morrigan family's real purpose in this world, a world of lurking danger and concealed horror, where the line between mythology and reality blur. Before he knows it he’s living another life where (seemingly) he has everything he ever wanted…a good job, no responsibilities…but what is the cause of this change? Where have his family gone? Why doesn’t anyone remember his old life?And most importantly, does he want it back?Folk’d interweaves a very modern tale of unexpected parenthood and responsibility set in contemporary Belfast with ancient Irish mythology and the supernatural. In Folk’d and its sequels, Folk’d Up Beyond All Recognition and Completely Folk’d, we are taken on a humorous, sometimes horrifying, always enthralling journey from modern-day Belfast to prehistory as the full and tragic tale of the Morrigan family is told.

    That is until her father dies suddenly & her whole world falls apart. The only person she can talk to is cute, scruffy, guitar-mad Zac, who always seems to know the right thing to say. Eva feels that the responsibility for keeping the Coonan family afloat rests on her shoulders.