Read Ireland Book Review
The 'Best' Irish Books of 2005
Northern Ireland: The Origins of the Troubles by Thomas Hennessey
Hardback; 30.00 Euro / 36.00 USD / 24.00 UK; 450 pages
Northern Ireland's Troubles are the tragedy of modern Irish history. Thomas Hennessey's study traces the long course of events that led to the climactic events of October 1968 and ends with the decision of the Provisional IRA to go to war with the British state in 1970. Many of Hennessey's conclusions are controversial. The Troubles were the product of a long inter-communal dispute between Unionist and Nationalist. From the start, Nationalists in Northern Ireland never accepted the legitimacy of the state while Unionists regarded Nationalists as a disloyal fifth column. But by the early 1960s it seemed that this old pattern of distrust was being replaced by a growing rapprochement between the two communities. A new generation of political leaders in Belfast and Dublin opened a dialogue that held out great promise. But the liberal temper of the times proved to be an illusion. The old antagonisms were too enduring. By 1969, when British troops were deployed to prevent civil war, the sectarian genie was out of the bottle. Soon the Troubles mutated into an insurgency against British rule in Northern Ireland. The result was tragedy.
The Last of the Celts by Marcus Tanner
Hardback; 37.00 Euro / 45.00 USD / 25.00 UK; 390 pages [Add To Basket]
A cultural tour spanning the Celtic world from the Outer Hebrides of Scotland to Brittany, and from Cape Breton to Patagonia, this book sets out to find out what has happened to the Celtic peoples in a world where pressure to conform to Anglo-American culture has grown ever stronger. Taking the form of a journey that starts in the wilds of north-west Scotland, before proceeding through western Wales, the Isle of Man, troubled Northern Ireland, the western seaboard of the Irish Republic and The French region of Brittany, the author weaves solid historical research into the language, religion, music and customs of the peoples concerned with first-hand encounters with a host of priests, ministers, government officials, cultural activists, musicians and writers. The author finds talk of a Celtic revival much misplaced, for while the term "Celtic" is banded around as never more, largely to suit the needs of commerce and tourism, the fragile cultures the word actually refers to in the north-west of Britain, Ireland and France are closer than ever before to extinction. As the author discovers on his journey, the tide is going out at different speeds in different places. While Welsh culture and language are (relatively) robust, the rich culture of the Bretons is heading for almost certain oblivion in a decade or two at most, as relentless, centuries-long pressure to "be French" reaches its climax. Nor are the prospects much brighter for the small Celtic communities in the New World. As the author travels from Cape Breton in Canada to Patagonia in Argentina, he finds the once sturdy communities of Gaelic and Welsh speakers facing exactly the same threats of assimilation and ultimate disappearance. It is a development that impoverishes as all.
The Atlantean Irish: Ireland’s Oriental and Maritime Heritage by Bob Quinn
Trade Paperback; 25.00 Euro / 30.00 USD / 20.00 UK; 272 pages, with full colour and black-and-white illustrations throughout
Irish identity is best understood from a maritime perspective. For eight millennia the island has been a haven for explorers, settlers, colonists, navigators, pirates and traders, absorbing goods and peoples from all points of the compass. The reduction of the islanders to the exclusive category 'Celtic' has persisted for three hundred years, and is here rejected as impossibly narrow. No classical author ever described Ireland's inhabitants as 'Celts', and neither did the Irish so describe themselves until recent times. The islanders' sea-girt culture has been crucially shaped by Middle Eastern as well as by European civilizations, by an Islamic heritage as well as a Christian one. The Irish language itself has antique roots extended over thousands of years' trading up and down the Atlantic seaways.
Over the past twenty years Bob Quinn has traced archaeological, linguistic, religious and economic connections from Egypt to Arann, from Morocco to Newgrange, from Cairo and Compostela to Carraroe. Taking Conamara sean-nos singing and its Arabic equivalents, and a North African linguistic stratum under the Irish tongue, Quinn marshalls evidence from field archaeology, boat-types, manuscript illuminations, weaving patterns, mythology, literature, art and artefacts to support a challenging thesis that cites, among other recent studies of the Irish genome, new mitochondrial DNA analysis in the Atlantic zone from north Iberia to west Scandinavia.
The Atlantean Irish is a sumptuously illustrated, exciting, intervention in Irish cultural history. Forcefully debated, and wholly persuasive, it opens up a past beyond Europe, linking Orient to Occident. What began as a personal quest-narrative becomes a category-dissolving intellectual adventure of universal significance. It is a book whose time has arrived.
The Midnight Court by Ciaran Carson
Paperback; 12.50 Euro / 16.00 USD / 8.50 UK; 80 pages [Add To Basket]
An outstanding poet, Ciaran Carson has also proved himself and adept and adventurous translator. Now he turns to a masterpiece perfectly suited to his abundant gifts, the eighteenth-century Irish 'Cúirt an Mhéan Oíche'. Brian Merriman's classic debate on marriage and the plight of young women culminates in the fairy goddess Aoibheall's judgement against men.
Carson echoes Merriman's mix of high rhetoric and rude colloquial wit and replicates his probing analysis of sexuality and social mores. The acrobatics of his couplets quicken the poem's passionate argument, capturing its nudges and winks in earthy, contemporary idiom.
What he calls Merriman's 'abundant lexicon of vilification . . . numerous double entendres and gorgeousness of verbal music' comes alive in his brilliant recreation. This Midnight Court unfolds with a spring — and a surprise — in every step. (Also available in Hardback, priced at 20 Euro)
Harbour Lights by Derek Mahon
Paperback; 12.50 Euro / 16.00 USD / 8.50 UK; 80 pages
When one of the finest contemporary poets produces a new collection containing some of his finest work our response is one of exhilaration and gratitude. The long, wide-ranging poems here (‘Resistance Days’, ‘Calypso’, ‘Harbour Lights’ itself) are interspersed with penetrating glances and a series of dazzling translations which enhance and extend their traditions; his version of ‘The Seaside Cemetery’ is a masterpiece. Together they form a book of rare organic unity and distinction.
The author’s resolution to study ‘clouds and their formation’ and his concentration on ‘the real thing’ affirm aesthetic values in a violent time. Remembering ‘lives in a former life’ and celebrating ‘the redemptive power of women’, his work is unique in its verve and fluency. Harbour Lights is an act of faith, and a triumph. (Also available in Hardback, priced at 20 Euro)
The Vanishing Kingdoms: Irish Chiefs and their Families by Walter J.P. Curley
Trade Paperback; 22.50 Euro / 28.00 USD / 18.00 UK; 190 pages, with and black-and-white illustrations throughout
Vanishing Kingdoms combines an account of aristocracy and its history in Ireland with an interview-based description of twenty recognized Irish chiefs of the name and their family backgrounds. Three of them, The O'Brien, O'Conor Don and The O'Neill, have legitimate claims to high kingship; all are descendants of territorial kings and sub-kings. For the most part shorn of their privileges and territories in a democratized, socially fluid Ireland of the twenty-first century, as a group the chiefs exercise a continuing fascination and a living link to the past, leaving an imaginative yet tangible mark on the Irish landscape.
The families are grouped by province ULSTER: The O'Neill; The O'Dogherty; The O'Donnell; MacDonnell; The Maguire MUNSTER: The O'Brien; The O'Callaghan; The O'Carroll; The O'Donovan; The O'Donoghue; The McGillycuddy; The O'Grady; The O'Long LEINSTER: The Fox; The O'Morchoe; The MacMorrough Kavanagh CONNACHT: O'Conor Don; The MacDermot; The O'Kelly; The O'Rorke
Through the unfolding diorama of these individual family stories, Vanishing Kingdoms gives an enriching view of Irish history and society. Contemporary portraits of the current chiefs, photographs and engravings of their dwellings, past and present, complement a vivid narrative.
The Real Chief: Liam Lynch by Meda Ryan
Paperback; 16.00 Euro / 19.00 USD / 11.00 UK; 220 pages [Add To Basket]
With the aid of Liam Lynch's personal letters, private documents and historical records, The Real Chief, traces the turbulent career of one of Ireland's greatest guerilla commanders from his birth in 1893 until his death twenty nine years later in the civil war when he ws killed in action on the Knockmeadlown mountains.
Old World Colony: Cork and South Munster, 1630-1830 by David Dickson
Hardback; 50.00 Euro / 75.00 USD / 35.00 UK; 736 pages, illustrated [Add To Basket]
This ground-breaking study focuses on one of Ireland’s wealthiest regions in the early modern period, south Munster, and traces its fortunes over two hundred years. The region’s strengths were its agricultural resources and its prime Atlantic location, and the rise of the city of Cork from insignificance to international importance was both critical in the exploitation of this wealth and symbolic of a new commercial order. Cork’s wholesale hinterland embraced much of Kerry, Waterford and Co. Cork itself, and the study examines the whole of the region.
Old world colony traces how rural society and farming evolved, and surveys the world of landowners and of the marginalized, of wealthy merchants and the teeming masses in the mushrooming city of Cork. It seeks to integrate what is usually set apart - social, economic and political history - in a fresh and unfamiliar panorama of material and public life across the heartlands of ‘the Hidden Ireland’ from the era of civil war and expropriation in the seventeenth century to the era of Catholic emancipation in the 1820s.
Colonization and commerce transformed the region, but growth came at a price. Many of the problems of pre-Famine Ireland – gross income inequality and land scarcity – were precociously evident in South Munster. This study therefore sets the more familiar landmarks of the nineteenth century – agrarian conflict, structural poverty, and the collapse of food supply – in a new and more complex landscape.
The primary purpose of the book is to reconstruct the framework of a pre-modern regional society in a way never before attempted for Ireland, and to demonstrate how that society worked. Many of its findings have national implications, and the book will also be of comparative interest to students of pre-industrial European and colonial American history. (Available in Paperback also at 30 Euro).
Witnesses: Inside the Easter Rising by Annie Ryan
Paperback; 13.00 Euro / 16.50 USD / 9.00 UK; 225 pages [Add To Basket]
Witnesses: Inside the Rising is the first book to draw on official witness statements (taken in the late 1940s) and only released to the public in 2002. In its judicious use of the statements given by the foot-soldiers and second-line participants in the Rising, the book provides a unique perspective on the events of Easter 1916. From the volunteers walking the Royal canal from Meath to fight in Dublin, to the women fighting, smuggling guns and cooking for the insurgents in the G.P.O, Witnesses puts the reader next to taking part in this pivotal event in modern Irish history. Insights into controversial matters such as the decision to countermand the order for the Rising on its eve, the so-called “Castle document”, as well as the personal affections and jealousies of those involved, are all discussed in detail. Above all the book is told in a warm readable way. The book will feature an introduction by well-known historian and author Dr.Margaret McCurtain.
Nineteenth-Century Ireland : A Guide to Recent Research edited by Lawrence Geary and Margaret Kelleher
Trade Paperback; 25 Euro / 31 USD / 17 UK; 340 pages
Interest in nineteenth-century studies has never been greater, and contrasts sharply with previous neglect of many aspects of that century's history and culture. These essays by leading scholars assess and interpret developments from 1990 onwards in the field of nineteenth-century Irish studies, and from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. The book covers political, social, religious and women's history and historical geography as well as anthropological and sociological studies of nineteenth-century Ireland. Further chapters cover nineteenth-century music, art history, literature in English, Gaelic culture and language and the Irish diaspora. This will be an invaluable research tool and reference book for many years to come.
Blanketmen: An Untold Story of the H-Block Hunger Strike by Richard O’Rawe
Trade Paperback; 14.00 Euro / 18.00 USD / 10.00 UK; 260 pages [Add To Basket]
'This inside account of the 1981 hunger strikes by one of the IRA prisoners' leaders is without doubt the most significant; it will force a complete reassessment of this pivotal episode in modern Irish history.' Ed Moloney author of A Secret History of the IRA
'I was told in 1991, when I privately criticised the role of the IRA Army Council in the hunger strike, that I could be shot if I opened my mouth. The threat had the desired effect.' Richard O'Rawe was a senior IRA prisoner in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh prison. One of the 'Blanketmen', he took part in the dirty protests that led to the hunger strikes of the early 1980s. Now Richard O'Rawe gives his personal and outspoken account of the turbulent times that saw British and Irish governments entering unprecedented negotiations with the IRA army council and the prisoners themselves. Passionate, disturbing and controversial, Blanketmen is a landmark text in the cruel history of Northern Ireland.
'A compelling and subversive book; essential reading for anybody interested in the IRA' Richard English author of Armed Struggle: A History of the IRA
Was Ireland a Colony?: Economics, Politics and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland edited by Terrence McDonough with an afterword by Terry Eagleton
Trade Paperback; 30.00 Euro / 36.00 USD / 20.00 UK; 360 pages
The nineteenth-century history of Irish economics, politics and culture cannot be properly understood without examining Ireland's colonial condition. Recent political developments and economic success have revived interest in the study of the colonial relationship between Britain and Ireland that is more nuanced than the traditional nationalist or academic revisionist view of Irish history. This new approach has arisen in several fields of historical investigation, notably culture, economics and political history.
The Squad and the Intelligence Operations of Michael Collins by T. Ryle Dwyer
Paperback; 13.00 Euro / 17.00 USD / 10.00 UK; 270 pages [Add To Basket]
In 1919, Michael Collins conceived of a scheme to knock out the eyes and ears of the British Administration at Dublin Castle by undermining and terrorising the police so that the British would react blindly and drive the Irish people into the arms of the Irish Republican Army. The Bureau of Military History interviewed those involved in this scheme in the early 1950s with the assurance that the material would not be published in their lifetimes. A few of the contributions were made available by the families of those involved, but the bulk of them have only recently been released. This the first book to make use of those interviews. It makes fascinating, almost unique reading, because they contain first-hand descriptions in which men speaking candidly of their involvement in killing selected people at close range. As a result it throws a considerable amount of new light on the activities of the Squad and the intelligence operations of Michael Collins.
Baptised in Blood: The Formation of the Cork Brigade of the Irish Volunteers 1913-1916 by Gerry White and Brendan O’Shea
Large Format Paperback; 15.00 Euro / 18.00 USD / 10.00 UK; 128 pages, with photos and illustrations throughout
The euphoria that surrounded the formation of the Irish Volunteers in Dublin in 1913 captured the imagination of the country and a series of similar meetings were organised for other locations throughout Ireland. In Cork a public meeting took place in City Hall on Sunday evening, 14 December 1913. After a very contentious meeting over 500 men enlisted in the new organisation and were constituted as 'The Cork City Corps' of the Irish Volunteers. The fragile unity achieved within the ranks of this countrywide Volunteer movement was shattered by the outbreak of the First World War. Thousands of their number set off to serve with great distinction in the tenth and sixteenth divisions of the British army. The more militant minority, of whom initially there remained only 12,000, refused to follow suit, and dominated by the IRB, they retained the title of 'Irish Volunteers' (Oglaig na hEireann), and set about the daunting task of rebuilding an entire organisation.
James Connolly: A Full Live by Donal Nevin
Hardback; 30.00 Euro / 36.00 USD / 24.00 UK; 850 pages
'Hasn't it been a full life, Lillie, and isn't this a good end?', were James Connolly's last words to his wife in Dublin Castle in the early hours of May 12, 1916 shortly before his execution in Kilmainham Jail. The first fourteen years of Connolly's life were spent in Edinburgh and the next seven years in the King's Liverpool Regiment in Ireland. In 1889, he returned to Edinburgh where he was a socialist activist and organiser for seven years. In 1896, at the age of 28, he was invited to Dublin as socialist organiser, founding the Irish Republican Socialist Party and editing "The Workers' Republic". During seven years in America between 1903 and 1910, Connolly was in turn active with the Socialist Labor Party, organiser for the IWW ('Wobblies') and a national organiser for the Socialist Party of America. Returning to Ireland in 1910 as organiser of the Socialist Party of Ireland, Connolly was appointed Ulster Organiser of the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union by James Larkin, succeeding him as acting general secretary in October 1914. As Commander of the Irish Citizen Army, Connolly joined with leaders of the Irish Republican Brotherhood in the Easter Rising in 1916, becoming Commandant-General of the Dublin Division of the Army of the Republic and Vice-President of the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic.
Memoir by John McGahern
Hardback; 23.00 Euro / 28.00 USD / 16.00 UK; 280 pages [Add To Basket]
This is the story of John McGahern's childhood; of his mother's death, his father's anger and bafflement, and his own discovery of literature and his ambition to become a writer. At the heart of the book is an unembarrassed homage by a loving son to a woman who protected him and his sisters from his father's unpredictable moods. His memory of walks with her in the lanes near their rural home, of her naming flowers for him and of his joy in her presence, is recovered with great lyrical tact. The account of her courageous endurance of illness - with almost no support from her policeman husband, who was living in his barracks - is unsentimental and unforgettable. The day their mother died, the children were carted off to the barracks where their father the sergeant ruled over a few guards and a quiet countryside where crime was almost unknown, during the war years when Ireland was cut off from the outside world. McGahern describes an adolescence dancing attendance on a secretive, brutal and mercurial man who had only spasms of affection to give his bereft children. Often he reasoned with them by using his fists. McGahern's description of the fields and quiet roads of Co Leitrim, one of Ireland's least known counties, catches the subtle beauties of an often poor landscape of hill and bog. The memoir is also a great portrait of Ireland in the 1940s and 50s, a time of frugal comfort but also of low expectation and depression for many people in a country that seemed to have no future. The author barely escaped being removed from school to do menial work through his discovery of books in the library of a friendly, eccentric neighbour. He found his way to the life of the mind, and a dream that he could himself write stories in which language and feeling mattered as much as the form of the tale. This memoir includes McGahern's memories of Dublin in the 1960s, his time as a schoolteacher, and his sacking for writing a banned book (his second novel, "The Dark"). It ends with his return to live in Leitrim with his wife and the death of his father, difficult to the last.
Eoin O’Duffy: A Self-Made Hero by Fearghal McGarry
Hardback; 35.00 Euro / 42.00 USD / 25.00 UK; 440 pages, with 20 black-and-white photographs [Add To Basket]
Eoin O'Duffy was one of the most controversial figures of modern Irish history. A guerrilla leader and protege of Michael Collins, he rose rapidly through the ranks of the republican movement. By 1922 he was chief of staff of the IRA, a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood's Supreme Council, and a Sinn Fein deputy in Dail Eireann. As chief of police, O'Duffy was the strongest defender of the Irish Free State only to become, after his emergence as leader of the Blueshirt movement in 1933, the greatest threat to its survival. Increasingly drawn to international fascism, he founded Ireland's first fascist party, and led an Irish Brigade to fight under General Franco in the Spanish Civil War. He died in wartime Dublin, a Nazi collaborator, and a broken man. This study, the first ever biography of Eoin O'Duffy, draws on unpublished archival and personal papers to trace his journey from revolutionary republicanism to fascism. It examines the importance of cultural forces, including the legacy of the Irish-Ireland movement, Catholicism, anti-communism, and O'Duffy's ideas on sports, morality, and masculinity to explain his descent into extremism. McGarry peels away the public persona to reveal a complex picture of the motives, which drove this extraordinary career. A crusading moralist and advocate of teetotalism, obsessed with the need to counter public immorality, who was at the same time a closet homosexual and alcoholic, O'Duffy's remarkable life was characterised by self-aggrandisement, fantasy, and contradiction. This fascinating biography explores themes as diverse as cultural nationalism, violence, sectarianism, militarism, and masculinity to shed new light on Irish republicanism and the politics of interwar European fascist movements. It is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the complexities of culture, politics, and society in interwar Ireland.
Easter 1916 by Charles Townsend
Hardback; 25.00 Euro / 30.00 USD / 20.00 UK; 440 pages with 8-page black-and-white photo insert [Add To Basket]
Before Easter 1916 Dublin had been a city much like any other British city, comparable to Bristol or Liverpool and part of a complex, deep-rooted British world. Many of Dublin's inhabitants wanted to weaken or terminate London's rule but there remained a vast and conflicting range of visions of that future: far more immediate was the unfolding disaster of the First World War that had put home rule' issues on ice for the duration. The devastating events of that Easter changed everything. Both the rising itself and - even more significantly - the ferocious British response ended any sense at all that Dublin could be anything other than the capital of an independent country, as an entire nation turned away in revulsion from the British artillery and executions. As we approach the 90th anniversary of the rebellion it is time for a new account of what really happened over those fateful few days. What did the rebels actually hope to achieve? What did the British think they were doing? And how were the events really interpreted by ordinary people across Ireland? Vivid, authoritative and gripping, Easter 1916 is a major work.
Lady Gregory: An Irish Life by Judith Hill
Hardback; 25.00 Euro / 30.00 USD / 19.00 UK; 400 pages with an 8-page black-and-white photo insert [Add To Basket]
She was the most complicated woman I can think of ...Very calculating, dutiful, courageous, purposeful, and all built upon a bedrock of humour and love of fun and a bitter sarcasm with a vein of simple coarseness of thought and simple inherited Protestantism.' This new biography of Lady Gregory (1852-1932) removes her from the shadow of the more famous Yeats (she wrote almost entirely the great Abbey Theatre hit Cathleen ni Houlihan, but let Yeats take the credit), and uncovers for the first time the full life of this key figure of the Irish Literary Revival. A founder of the now world-famous Abbey Theatre, she had a profound influence on Yeats and other writers including Henry James and Anthony Trollope. She herself wrote 42 plays, as well as a biography, essays, stories, poems, and an autobiography. Married to a man twice her age, she had an extra-marital affair with the poet and anti-Imperialist Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and at 60, a brief romance with the New York lawyer and art patron John Quinn. Placing Gregory securely into the Ireland of her time, the author shows how Lady Gregory's Nationalism in politics and literature fundamentally shaped her life and work.
Mick: The Real Michael Collins by Peter Hart
Hardback; 30.00 Euro / 36.00 USD / 22.00 UK; 480 pages
Few people have had as profound an impact on their country's history in so short a time as Michael Collins had on twentieth-century Ireland. Dead at thirty-one, assassinated by a compatriot, he had already fought in the Easter Rising, been elected to four different parliaments, organized the IRA and smuggled in its arms, launched its guerrilla war, beat British intelligence at its own game, financed the revolution, negotiated the Anglo-Irish Treaty, run the first independent government of Ireland, and led the Irish army to victory as its first Commander-in-Chief. Collins gained international fame as the mystery man who could not be caught, the man who won the war and, paradoxically, the man who made peace with the British Empire and made it stick. That he also paid the ultimate price has ensured that he remains a hero and an icon both in his native country and abroad. Peter Hart's compelling and comprehensive biography draws on many hitherto unseen sources to explore the life of Michael Collins and to ask what made him such an extraordinary and complex man. Set to become the definitive work, Hart's is the first book fully to investigate Collins's life before becoming a revolutionary and the first to take a critical look at his rise to power and its consequences.
That Day’s Struggle: A Memoir 1904-1951 by Sean MacBride
Hardback; 25.00 Euro / 30.00 USD / 20.00 UK; 240 pages, with black-and-white photo insert [Add To Basket]
'I had to sit down and think for a couple of days afterwards, ask myself: are you prepared to face this; it's quite likely that you yourself will get killed in time. Are you really prepared to do this; if not, you better make up your mind, now, not to, or make up your mind to go ahead.' The son of Maud Gonne and and exceuted 1916 revolutionary Major John MacBride, Sean MacBride inherited his parents' revolutionary politics. In this fascinating memoir, he describes those early revolutionary years, bringing them to life with rare skill. MacBride became an anti-Treaty Republican and in the 1930s and 1940s, when he was chief of staff of the IRA, he argued for greater participation in constitutional politics. He founded Clann na Poblachta in 1946, which formed an important component of the inter-party government of 1948-51. A bitter dispute with Minister for Health, Noel Browne, lead to the collapse of the government and the virtual extinction of his party, which period concludes this terrific memoir.
The Sea by John Banville
Hardback; 20.00 Euro / 26.00 USD / 14.00 UK; 264 pages
The brilliant new novel by the Booker-shortlisted author of Shroud and The Book of Evidence, John Banville is, quite simply, one of the greatest novelists writing in the English language today. When Max Morden returns to the coastal town where he spent a holiday in his youth he is both escaping from a recent loss and confronting a distant trauma. The Grace family appear that long ago summer as if from another world. Drawn to the Grace twins, Chloe and Myles, Max soon finds himself entangled in their lives, which are as seductive as they are unsettling. What ensues will haunt him for the rest of his years and shape everything that is to follow. John Banville is one of the most sublime writers working in the English language. Utterly compelling, profoundly moving and illuminating, The Sea is quite possibly the best thing he has ever written. Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2005.
A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry
Trade Paperback; 20.00 Euro / 25.00 USD / 13.00 UK; 292 pages [Add To Basket]
Barely eighteen years old, Willie Dunne leaves Dublin in 1914 to fight for the Allied cause, largely unaware of the growing political and religious tensions festering back home. Told in Sebastian Barry's characteristically beautiful prose, A Long Long Way evokes the camaraderie and humour of Willie and his regiment, the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, but also the cruelty and sadness of war, and the divided loyalties that many Irish soldiers felt. Tracing their experiences through the course of the war, the narrative brilliantly explores and dramatises the events of the Easter Rising within Ireland, and how such a seminal political moment came to affect those boys off fighting for the King of England on foreign fields - the paralysing doubts and divisions it caused them.
It also charts Willie's coming of age, his leaving behind of his sweetheart Gretta, and the effect the war has on his relationship with his father, a member of the Dublin Military Police and fervent loyalist. Running throughout is the question of how such young men came to be fighting in a war, and how they struggled with the events that raged around them.
The Faber Book of Best New Irish Short Stories 2004-5 edited by David Marcus
Trade Paperback; 20.00 Euro / 25.00 USD / 13.00 UK; 324 pages
A stunning collection of new short stories that illustrates the vibrancy and eclecticism of contemporary Irish writing. In 'The Joke' a middle-aged man sits listening to his wife's conversation on the phone, at once bitter and sweetly yearning; in 'The Cocktail Hour' a couple wander the night haunted, seemingly lost in a reverie of the jazz age and the movies; in 'Matters of Life and Death' two young brothers spend the night at the house of the local doctor and his wife, and together the four of them end up in a late-night dance . . .
In this collection, his first for Faber and Faber, David Marcus has brought together some of Ireland's best-loved writers with both the new, emerging generation and some previously unpublished authors. From Ireland itself to the United States, from rural Peru to the mountains of the Himalayas, these stories collectively and individually demonstrate the complexity of emotion and memory that characterise the very finest short stories, and bear testimony to the fact that it is an art form that is still alive and flourishing.
Writers included are: Molly McCloskey, Roddy Doyle, Gillman Noonan, Paula Cunningham, Gerard Donovan, Blánaid McKinney, Cóilín Ó hAodha, Mary Burke, William Wall, Julia O'Faolain, Bernard MacLaverty, George O'Brien, Mary Morrissy, Neil Jordan, Hugo Hamilton, Claire Keegan, Colum McCann, Edna O'Brien, Niall Williams, Tom MacIntyre, Colm Tóibín, Dermot Somers and Sophia Hillan.
Heaven Lies About Us by Eugene McCabe
Trade Paperback; 19.00 Euro / 24.00 USD / 12.00 UK; 310 pages
In these twelve stories, Eugene McCabe plumbs the soul of the Irish border counties, where confusion, divided loyalties, and heightened emotions are part of everyday life, whether that life is lived in the aftermath of 'the Great Hunger' or in the face of sectarian bitterness, suspicion and conflict. A master of arresting dialogue and intimate characterisation, celebrated as a major playwright and author of one of the most important Irish novels of the last fifty years, McCabe demonstrates his outstanding gift for short fiction in this revelatory and haunting collection.
Torn Water by John Lynch
Hardback; 17.00 Euro / 21.00 USD / 13.00 UK; 265 pages [Add To Basket]
Set in his native Northern Ireland, John Lynch's debut novel is a lyrically told and exquisitely tender story of innocence and loss. 'He remembers when he was very young standing by water! How he had got there or where the pond was he couldn't remember, but he can vaguely recall a larger hand on his and being led through the high rooms of a large building, to a large garden, where bees wove dozy patterns in the air. At the bottom of this garden lay the large pond, and he remembers a face bending to meet his and whispering that he would be back in a little while. So he stood where he had been left, his small feet pointing at the stonework of the pond's rim. He remembers a wind brewing in the tops of the trees and tearing at the water of the pond for a moment, before subsiding, his face blurring into focus like a TV channel being tuned.' When James Lavery's father is blown to bits by a bomb he intended to maim and kill others with, the boy keeps him alive in his imagination as a superhero, escaping the daily grind of school, his mother's drinking and his own acute loneliness by inventing extraordinary adventures for them both.
The Family on Paradise Pier by Dermot Bolger
Trade Paperback; 14.00 Euro / 17.00 USD / 10.00 UK; 526 pages [Add To Basket]
Starting in the tranquil idyll of a Donegal village in 1915, The Family on Paradise Pier follows the extraordinary journeys of one Irish family through the War of Independence, the General Strike in Britain, the dangerous streets of 1930's Moscow, the Spanish Civil War and on to Soviet gulags, Irish Internment camps and London during the Blitz. The Goold Verschoyle children are born into a respected freethinking Protestant family in a Manor House alive with laughter, debate and fascinating guests. But the world of picnics and childish infatuations is soon under threat as political changes within Ireland and the wider world encroach upon their private paradise.
The Family on Paradise Pier shows how quickly a family and a class can find themselves displaced and considered foreigners within their own land, with a new generation forced to invent new roles in which to belong. For Eva the dream is to be an artist, yet her fragile vision cannot cope with first loveor the reality of London art school. She finds herself married into a stiff Anglo-Irish family, struggling with growing debts and with trying to keep open her soul to the new perceptions while yearning for personal freedom.
Politics is how Eva's brothers make sense of their new world. The eldest son, Art, rejects his inheritance to become a hard-line Marxist. Isolating himself from his family, he tries to belong among the poor, a party agitator working as a manual labourer in Dublin, Moscow and London. Brendan, the carefree and less fanatical younger brother, also embraces communism until confronted by its harsh realities in the Spanish Civil War with consequences that will haunt and divide his family.
Based on real-life people, this family saga grows into an extraordinarily kaleidoscopic portrait of the lives, dreams and tensions of a generation finding their own paths in life between the World Wars. Bolger superbly recreates a family in flux, driven by idealism, racked by argument and united by love and the vivid memories of childhood. The Family of Paradise Pier shows Bolger at the height of his powers as a master storyteller. It is a spellbinding and magnificent achievement. (Also available in Hardback priced at 25 Euro)
This Human Season by Louise Dean
Trade Paperback; 15.00 Euro / 18.00 USD / 10.00 UK; 368 pages [Add To Basket]
It is December 1979. Kathleen's son Sean has been convicted of a crime on behalf of the IRA and sent to Long Kesh prison - newly renamed the Maze. John Dunn has just taken up a job as a prison guard after leaving the army. Both will be shocked at what they find. Both will try to do the right thing, and fail. Neither will ever be the same again.
Louise Dean's sensational new novel deals with one of the most explosive and morally complex incidents in recent British history. THIS HUMAN SEASON is a powerful, confronting, humane, and blackly funny examination of the lives of ordinary people when placed in the vice of history.
An Irish History of Civilization: Volume One by Don Akenson
Hardback; 35.00 Euro / 42.00 USD / 25.00 UK; 826 pages [Add To Basket]
St Patrick catching sight of Ireland for the first time as he is taken there as a prisoner...Joyce and Yeats eating sticky buns in a Dublin cafe...There has never before been an Irish history book remotely like this one, composed as a vast mosaic of incidents, encounters and vignettes. It is not so much a 'history of Irish civilization' as an 'Irish history of civilization'. In telling a wide range of stories about the Irish everywhere this historical-fictional account of the Irish peoples around the globe from the time of Christ to 1969 opens up the really big issues - the relationship between the minute particulars and the larger patterns which gradually become apparent. The stories themselves are by turns funny, acerbic, ironic, score-settling - never quite what they seem at face value. They are also deeply informed by the author's vast knowledge of Ireland, its history and its diaspora. For once the hyperbole is true - after this book, Irish history will never be the same again.
Gregory Carr, Bookseller
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