Read Ireland Book News
Issue 97
New Irish Fiction
Mondo Desperado by Patrick McCabe (Paperback; 10.00 IEP / 13.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
Patrick McCabe's prose is a brilliantly macabre as ever. You wouldn't expect to find a mature woman of 28 years of age mixed up with a bunch of swingers in a small town like Barntrosna. But that's exactly what happened, according to Larry Bunyan. And he should know, she was his wife. As for Declan Coyningham … there wasn't a holier boy in all of the village - you couldn't move in town without finding a bit of him in your patch or under a hedge. And what exactly did come over Noreen Tiernan that made her chriek to wake the dead as she left the main street of the village in a Morris Minor all decked in pink and blue? In scenes of disarming inventiveness - from a farmer's romance and his skin condition to one man's culinary relationship with Bruce Lee - this novel will make you howl with laughter from the first unnerving page to the last.
The Marching Season by Daniel Silva (Hardback; 16.99 IRP / 23.80 USD) [Add To Basket]
Peace has broken out in Northern Ireland. The Good Friday agreement promises an end to thirty years of violence. Until one afternoon … Eamonn Dillon of Sinn Fein is the first to die. Shot by a gunman on the streets of Belfast. Simultaneously in Dublin a bomb leaves the National Library in ruins. And in London a suitcase packed with Sextex explodes and detroys the Underground at Heathrow Airport. The frightening realization that a new Protestant terrorist group, the Ulster Volunteer Brigade, wants anything but peace and this by its actions the world will be forced to see Ulster from the Protestant perspective is the starting point for this mesmerizing thriller. The book is a compelling mix of power, intrigue, politics and a touch of romance.
By Shannon's Way by Kathleen Sheehan O'Connor (Paperback; 9.99 IRP / 14.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
A Dublin executive moves with his family to a wealthy part of Limerick, where they soon get to know their neighbours, owners of a large export business. The lives of the teenage children soon become entwined, but secrets from the past emerge to destroy their peace of mind - secrets of a night during the war before an RAF pilot returned to duty as one of the 'dam-busters.' This novel of the Ireland in the 1960s is full of warmth and humour, heartbreak and tears by the author who has been lauded as the 'new Maeve Binchy'!
The Marriage at Antibes: Stories by Carol Azadeh (Paperback; 7.99 IRP / 11.60 USD) [Add To Basket]
These dazzling short fictions interrogate themes of home and exile, memory and yearning, childhood and ageing, and much else besides. Their scenes are laid in Ireland, France, Spain and North Africa at various moments in the century now ending, but at their core lie universal and timeless relationships - man-woman, father-daughter, landlord-tenant - scrupously observed and piercingly understood. These stories of travel, unbelonging and otherness, related with the poised eye of a young Elizabeth Bowen, and with remarkable emotional power, announce a compelling voice in Irish fiction.
Revenge by K.T. McCaffrey (Paperback; 5.99 IRP / 8.70 USD) [Add To Basket]
An uncompromising thriller: relentlessly gripping. Susan Furlong, an attractive 30-year-old, is obsessed with the desire for revenge on the man who raped her 12 years ago. But J.P. Murray, a powerful businessman with influential friends in the 'natural party of government,' is not to be the only victim of Susan's vengeance. Getting back the daughter she conceived as a result of the rape becomes her goal. All those who stand in her way, who try to silence her, to keep her story from the media - from the highest echelons of church and state - will suffer. Justice is not enough: Susan is hell-bent of revenge. Who can stop her? Emma Boylan, investigative journalist, a young woman who has the guts to go where the police and government investigations fear to tread. It is up to her to ask the right questions, to pursue the evaders.
Harmattan by Gaye Shortland (Paperback; 6.99 IEP / 9.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
As the dust-laden harmattan wind sweeps over the southern Sahara, Ellen, an Irishwoman, searches for her lost lover and struggles to come to terms with a culture which is hovering on the verge of extinction.
Penultimate and Other Stories by Aubrey Dillon-Malone (Paperback; 5.99 IRP / 8.70 USD) [Add To Basket]
These seventeen rite of passage stories deal broadly with love, loss, violence, religion and the pained parabolas of romance. From the turmoil of adolescence through the reflectiveness of middle age, the author chronicles the fortunes of his characters with lyricism and bittersweet humour as the reader moves from closely-knit communities to the wider world outdoors. The quotidian mixes with the adventurous in a heady melange that encapsulates an emotional range of experience within so many telling vignettes.
Thin Air by Kate Thompson (Paperback; 10.00 IRP / 13.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
To outsiders, the Keane family looks content enough. They live on the beautiful west coast of Ireland where Brigid cooks lunches in a local hotel and her husband, Gerard, produces beef and sport horses on the family farm. Their children seem to be turning out all right and, if their lives are not entirely happy, they are at least uneventful. Until one day when their eldest daughter's horse returns home without her. Martina seems to have vanished into thin air and no one can explain why. Each member of the family, isolated in their confusion, deals with the crisis in their own separate way. Now that the fabric of normality has been breached, the family will have to come to terms with what they find beyond it. This is a remarkable novel with haunting descriptions of the magic and history of the Irish landscape, a lyrical study of how a family can survive and renew itself in the face of a painful breakdown.
Flipside by Tina Reilly (Paperback; 6.99 IEP / 9.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
Meet Jan. She's 25 and clueless, with no idea what to do about her life. She wears too much make-up and too little clothes, has a crummy typing job, no man and a deep dark secret that she only talks about when she's had a few jars (drinks) on her. In fact, her life verges on the boring side of disastrous. Then out of the blue something happens that threatens to turn her life upside down. She soon realises that being a disastrous thrity-womething is worth fighting for. Together with her slightly strange family, two flatmates, Al, a shy workmate and Dave, a newly acquired eco-warrior boyfriend, the battle begins!
Maddy Goes to Hollywood by Maureen Martella (Paperback; 5.99 IEP / 8.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
At thirty-three years of age Maddy O'Toole is stranded on Cold Comfort Farm, deep in rural Ireland, with a monosyllabic husband, two children, and her mother. The only bright spot in her day in the American television soap she's addicted to. Then she discovers that her long-lost sister Gloria is living in Hollywood. No sooner has Gloria invited her than Maddy's on the plane. But what she envisages as a short break ends up changing her life. For when she arrives at Gloria's hopelessly luxurious Bel Air home she falls helplessly in lust with her sister's gorgeous and gentle actor boyfriend, Carlos, none other than the star of her favourite soap. It's not going to endear her to her sister, but Maddy can't bring herself to contemplate going home …
The Draughtsman and the Unicorn: Stories by Anthony Glavin (Paperback; 6.99 IEP / 9.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
Set variously in Donegal, Dublin, Boston, Nicaragua and Majorca, the stories in this collection chart the bittersweet and comic misadventures of his protagonists as they encounter such mysteries as love, betrayal, and mortality. A policeman on holidays suddenly confronted with the name of his trade; a mother haunted by a childhood hoax; a milkman realising too late the deadliness of a practical joke; a young woman in the stunningly atmospheric title story who fancies herself as the last unicorn. Ambient and enchanting, this collection offers a series of slowly revealed, unexpected and often devastating insights into the nuances and vagaries of the human condition.
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