Read Ireland Book News - Issue 36
<-- [Back To Main Menu] The Potato Year by Lucy Madden (paperback; 9.99 IRP / 15.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
365 ways of cooking potatoes. This book is written in calendar form, with a recipe for each day of the year. It is a personal collection; not just of ways of cooking potatoes but scattered with information about the cultural, social and historical role of the world's best loved vegetable.
A sometime journalist, keen cook and gardener, the author, together with her husband, own and run Hilton Park in County Monaghan, and are founder members of Hidden Ireland, an association of country houses accommodating paying guests. Potatoes flourish in the Hilton organic gardens; in the house they feature in soups and salads, in combination with other vegetables, meats and fish, in breads, baking, drinks and preserves. Visitors from all over the world who stay at Hilton have helped put together this eclectic collection so that the potato year comprises both the simple and exotic including of course the traditional Irish ways with potatoes.
Country Cooking 2 by Jenny Bristow (paperback; 8.99 IRP / 13.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
Based on her immensely successful television series, Jenny Bristow's new book contains a further collection of delectable recipes from other cuisings and will inspire you with its range of traditional dishes from around the world. Each has had jenny's special magic applied to make it straightforward and simple to prepare. And as always, the accent is on combining healthy eating with wholesome, tasty ingredients.
Shadow Dancer by Tom Bradby (hardback; 12.99 IRP / 19.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
This novel is a chilling, complex and utterly compelling thriller about the choices we make and why we make them. It is a riveting portrait of a group of people torn apart by the strife of civil war and the overwhelming pull of family attachments.
Colette McVeigh: widow ... mother ... terrorist. A woman who has lived the Irish Republican cause for all of her 33 years. A woman whose brothers are both heavily involved at a senior level in the IRA, whose husband was killed by the British security forces. A woman who is now an informer for the British Secret Service, MI5.
Apprehended by the police in an aborted bombing raid in London, Colette is given a simple choice: talk and see her children again, or stay silent and spend the rest of her life watching them grow up from behind the bars of a prison cell.
Gradually and unwillingly she is led to betray her past by her young MI5 handler, David Ryan, who has never doubted where his loyalties lie. But when he follows Colette across the Irish Sea to Belfast, the very tenets of his existence - trust, loyalty and honesty - are quickly sacrificed on the pyre of the province's history. And, as he watches Colette put herself in increasing danger to fulfil her side of the bargain, he realizes that his professional integrity is irrevocably and fatally compromised.
The Wexford Rising in 1798: Its Cause and Its Course by Charles Dickson (hardback; 19.00 IRP / 28.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
Local tradition is silent on the subject of the Wexford Rising: the social and political wounds it inflicted went too deep for storytelling, and the passions and controversies it arounsed were so violent that, writing almost 160 years after the event, Charles Dickson is one of the first to have attempted an account that is objective and non-partisan. This book is a classic exploration of this telling episode, a vital moment in Ireland's history, and characteristic of so many struggles that preceded it and followed it: Catholic against Protestant, people against establishment; just Irish cause and savage English repression; courage and idealism, faction and betrayal, brutality and military incompetence; the vain hope of international intervention.
Dickson's fascinating biographical notes on the key players, his critical bibliography and his use of unpublished letters and documents add scholarship and substance to his account of this brief but horrifying piece of history.
The Tellicherry Five: The Transportation of Michael Dwyer and the Wicklow Rebels by Kieran Sheedy (paperback; 9.95 IRP / 15.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
In another age they would have passed their lives as sheep farmers and brewery workers. But this was the year 1798 and as the defeated rebel forces sought refuge in the Wicklow mountains a band of local men, led by Michael Dwyer, fought a stubborn rearguard action which continued for five years until their surrender in the aftermath of the rebellion of Robert Emmet.
The subsequent transportation of Michael Dwyer, Hugh Vesty Byrne, Martin Burke, Arthur Devlin and John Mernagh to New South Wales in the convict ship Tellicherry, ostensibly with the rights of free settlers, brough them instead in direct conflict with the dictatorial governor William Bligh of the Bounty. As they struggled to attain economic independence for their families, the harsh reality of life in the penal colony involved them in further struggles with an uncomprehending system of justice.
This book is a 'popular' history: a compelling account of ordinary men and women who survived a period of unimaginable horror and whose ultimate triumph came in the shape of their descendants who helped to shape the destiny of the new land of Australia.
Far From the Land: Contemporary Irish Plays edited by John Fairleigh and forward by Sebastian Barry (paperback; 9.99 IRP / 15.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
This anthology contains 6 startling and often provocative plays by playwrights working in the north and south of Ireland, have each been viewed as groundbreaking events in contemporary Irish theatre. They trace the restless urban ambition in contemporary Irish drama to turn the past on its head and look back at the land with scepticism and sometimes a rough, rude glee.
The plays: At the Black Pig's Dyke by Vincent Woods, Language Roulette by Daragh Carville, Disco Pigs by Enda Walsh, Bat the Father Rabbit the Son by Donal O'Kelly, Frank Pig Says Hello by Patrick McCabe and Hard to Believe by Conall Morrison.
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