Read Ireland Book Review
Issue 301
A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry
Trade Paperback; 20.00 Euro / 25.00 USD / 13.00 UK; 292 pages
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 [Add To Basket]
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has brought together some of Ireland's best-loved writers with both the new, emerging generation and some previously unpublished authors.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.
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
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.
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.
Clearing the Air: The Battle Over the Smoking Ban by Noel Gilmore
Paperback; 10.00 Euro / 13.00 USD / 7.00 UK; 160 pages
This thought-provoking and wide-ranging study, published to coincide with the first anniversary of the smoking ban, presents a behind-the-scenes account of how the ban was brought in. The book looks at the influence of all the major players in the drama, from Health Minister Micheál Martin and other health-promotion advocates, who championed the ban, to the publicans, hoteliers, tobacco and drinks industry interests, and TDs who sometimes fiercely opposed it. "Clearing The Air” also examines the probable long-term implications of the ban for the health of the Irish people, for the hospitality sector and for international anti-smoking efforts, as countries such as Scotland and England announce plans for similar measures. The book features a foreword by Jeffrey Wigand - made famous in the Russell Crowe/Al Pacino film “The Insider” which dramatised Wigand’s courage in blowing the whistle on big tobacco in the U.S. in the 1990‘s.
The Landed Gentry and Aristocracy of County Kildare by Turtle Bunbury
Hardback; 35.00 Euro / 445.00 USD / 25.00 UK; 220 pages, with illustrations [Add To Basket]
Turtle Bunbury’s debut book, “The Landed Gentry & Aristocracy of Kildare”, offers a unique and lively historical insight into eighteen of Co. Kildare’s most influential “big house” families. The book features fifty illustrations and covers more than a thousand years of Irish history. The families profiled are those of Aylmer, Barton, de Burgh, Clements, Conolly, Guinness, Henry, Fennell, FitzGerald, Latten, La Touche, Mansfield, Maunsell, Medlicott, More O’Ferrall, Moore, de Robeck, and Wolfe. The story of these often eccentric dynasties is set against the backdrop of the past – the violent religious wars of the 17th century, the rise of the British Empire in the 18th and the run up to Irish independence in 1921.
Vintage Red by Michael Judge
Hardback; 25.00 Euro / 33.00 USD / 18.00 UK; 220 pages [Add To Basket]
When his wife dies, Irish property developer Robert McGuinness views the event as his passport to sexual freedom and political success, only to discover that she has led a disturbing life that he knew nothing about, which throws into unflattering relief his domestic failure, his public amorality and his personal hypocrisy. And when shy teacher, Seamus Creedon follows a red-haired woman with a Galway accent, he little realizes how such a lightly undertaken and seemingly insignificant adventure will permanently change the whole course of his life. This novel has much to say about political cynicism, steadfast heroism and deep commitment, against a backdrop of modern Dublin and the wild countryside of Connemara.
Gregory Carr, Bookseller
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