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Thin Places

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A breathtaking mix of memoir, nature writing and history: this is Kerri ni Dochartaigh’s story of a wild Ireland, an invisible border, an old conflict and the healing power of the natural world’A special, beautiful, many-faceted book’ Amy Liptrot’A remarkable piece of writing . . .

Luminous’ Robert Macfarlane’Eloquent . . .

moving’ Sinead GleesonKerri ni Dochartaigh was born in Derry, on the border of the North and South of Ireland, at the very height of the Troubles. She was brought up on a council estate on the wrong side of town. But for her family, and many others, there was no right side.

One parent was Catholic, the other was Protestant. In the space of one year they were forced out of two homes and when she was eleven a homemade petrol bomb was thrown through her bedroom window. Terror was in the very fabric of the city, and for families like Kerri’s, the ones who fell between the cracks of identity, it seemed there was no escape.

In Thin Places, a mixture of memoir, history and nature writing, Kerri explores how nature kept her sane and helped her heal, how violence and poverty are never more than a stone’s throw from beauty and hope, and how we are, once again, allowing our borders to become hard, and terror to creep back in. Kerri asks us to reclaim our landscape through language and study, and remember that the land we fight over is much more than lines on a map. It will always be ours but, at the same time, it never really was.

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Fred Finn

The Sligo Book of Tunes –

A complete Irish Music Learning Programme From Beginners to Advanced Students.

Includes over 200 Tunes

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THE NEW NOVEL FROM THE INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF FOSTER, ANTARCTICA AND WALK THE BLUE FIELDS’A single one of Keegan’s grounded, powerful sentences can contain volumes of social history. Every word is the right word in the right place, and the effect is resonant and deeply moving.’ Hilary Mantel ‘This is a tale of courage and compassion, of good sons and vulnerable young mothers. Absolutely beautiful.’ Douglas Stuart ‘Marvellous-exact and icy and loving all at once.’ Sarah Moss ‘A haunting, hopeful masterpiece.’ Sinead Gleeson It is 1985, in an Irish town.

During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, faces into his busiest season. As he does the rounds, he feels the past rising up to meet him – and encounters the complicit silences of a people controlled by the Church. The long-awaited new work from the author of Foster, Small Things Like These is an unforgettable story of hope, quiet heroism and tenderness.

‘Astonishing. Claire Keegan makes her moments real – and then she makes them matter.’ Colm Toibin ‘A true gift of a book. a sublime Chekhovian shock.’ Andrew O’Hagan ‘A moral tale that is unsentimental and deeply affecting, because true and right.’ David Hayden

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Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland vol v
€0.00
O NUALLAIN, SEAN

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Memory

The Sligo Rape Crisis Centre deals with some of the most
difficult things that can happen to anyone. The trauma of
intimate violence can shake a person’s experience of being
to the core. The work of exploring this experience with a
view to living in a more comfortable way is a deeply healing
process. The therapist is there, present, as an authentic
witness. They can offer reflections on thoughts, feeling and
sensations, observed behaviours, expressions, and help
access the journey towards recovery.

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1950s Dublin, in a lock-up garage in the city, the body of a young woman is discovered, an apparent suicide. But pathologist Dr Quirke and Detective Inspector Strafford soon suspect foul play.

The victims sister, a newspaper reporter from London, returns to Dublin to join the two men in their quest to uncover the truth. But, as they explore her links to a wealthy German family in County Wicklow, and to investigative work she may have been doing in Israel, they are confronted with an ever-deepening mystery.

With relations between the two men increasingly strained, and their investigation taking them back to the final days of the Second World War, can they join the pieces of a hidden puzzle?

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Donegal has a rich heritage of myths and legends which is uniquely captured in this collection of traditional tales from the county. Discover the trails where Balor of the Evil Eye once roamed, the footprint left by St Colmcille when he leapt to avoid a demon and the places where ordinary people once encountered devils, ghosts, and fairies. In a vivid journey through Donegal’s varied landscape, from its spectacular rugged coast line to the majestic mountains of Errigal and Muckish, and on to the rich farmland of the east, local storyteller Joe Brennan takes the reader to places where legend and landscape are inseparably linked.

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Silverland charts Dervla Murphy’s extraordinary expedition through the snowscapes of Far Eastern Russia. No stranger to adventure, the intrepid septuagenarian’s mid-winter journey takes her beyond Siberia to the furthest corners of Russia – areas proximate to Japan, Mongolia and the Arctic Circle. Here she discovers a strange world of lynx and elks, indigenous tribes and shamanism, reindeer broth and taiga-berry pie.

She takes the coal-fuelled slow-train around regions hardly exposed to tourism and there she meets a host of colourful and generous characters. They invite this unconventional Irish Babushka into their homes where she enjoys fascinating fireside debate bolstered by steaming samovars of sweet tea. Just like its author, Silverland is insightful, warm and truly original.

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Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba – the catastrophe that led to the displacement and expulsion of more than 700,000 people – and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers capture and rape a young Palestinian woman, and kill and bury her in the sand. Many years later, a woman in Ramallah becomes fascinated to the point of obsession with this ‘minor detail’ of history.

A haunting meditation on war, violence and memory, Minor Detail cuts to the heart of the Palestinian experience of dispossession, life under occupation, and the persistent difficulty of piecing together a narrative in the face of ongoing erasure and disempowerment.

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Water In The Desert, Fire In The Night

Because the thing about the end of the world is that it happens all the time. Someone leaves and it’s the end of the world. Someone comes back and it’s the end of the world.

Somebody puts their cock in you and it’s the end of the world. Somebody stops putting their cock in you and it’s the end of the world. Here is a novel about mothering, wolves, bicycles, midwifery, post-apocalyptic feminism, gold, hunger and hope.

It’s about an underachieving millennial, a retired midwife and an Irishman who set out from London after the end of the world to cycle to a sanctuary in the southern Alps. It’s about the porousness of the female bodily experience, the challenges of being an empiricist with a sample size of one, what’s worth knowing, what’s worth living, and the necessity of irrationality. It’s about the fact that the world ends all the time, and it’s about what to try to do next.

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A Terrible Beauty Is Born
€2.70
‘But I, being poor, have only my dreams; / I have spread my dreams under your feet…’By turns joyful and despairing, some of the twentieth century’s greatest verse on fleeting youth, fervent hopes and futile sacrifice.

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Winter’s Tale
€4.00
The Winter’s Tale, one of Shakespeare’s later romantic comedies, offers a striking and challenging mixture of tragic and violent events, lyrical love-speeches, farcical comedy, pastoral song and dance, and, eventually, dramatic revelations and reunions. Thematically, there is a rich orchestration of the contrasts between age and youth, corruption and innocence, decline and regeneration. Both Leontes’ murderous jealousy and Perdita’s love-relationship with Florizel are eloquently intense.

In the theatre, The Winter’s Tale often proves to be diversely entertaining and deeply moving.

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TOM SAWYER AND HUCKLEBERRY FINN
€4.00
Tom Sawyer, a shrewd and adventurous boy, is as much at home in the respectable world of his Aunt Polly as in the self-reliant and parentless world of his friend Huck Finn. The two enjoy a series of adventures, accidentally witnessing a murder, establishing the innocence of the man wrongly accused, as well as being hunted by Injun Joe, the true murderer, eventually escaping and finding the treasure that Joe had buried. Huckleberry Finn recounts the further adventures of Huck, who runs away from a drunken and brutal father, and meets up with the escaped slave Jim.

They float down the Mississippi on a raft, participating in the lives of the characters they meet, witnessing corruption, moral decay and intellectual impoverishment. Sharing so much in background and character, these two stories, the best of Twain, indisputably belong together in one volume. Though originally written as adventure stories for young people, the vivid writing provides a profound commentary on provincial American life in the mid-nineteenth century and the institution of slavery.

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TAMING OF THE SHREW
€4.00
The Taming of the Shrew is one of the most famous and controversial of Shakespeare’s comedies. The central relationship, in which Petruchio boisterously ‘tames’ a rebellious Kate, has often appeared problematic. In the theatre, it has been treated in a diversity of ways, so that Kate’s apparent capitulation varies between the ironic and the sincere.

Feminists have been divided in their responses.

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FABLES
€4.00
Aesop’s celebrated collection of fables has always been popular with both adults and children. These simple tales embody truths so powerful, the titles of the individual fables – the fox and the grapes, the dog in the manger, the wolf in sheep’s clothing and many others – have entered the languages and idioms of most European tongues

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COLLECTED WORKS OF NATHANAEL WEST
€4.00
The four novels gathered here constitute the complete longer works of one the most brilliant and original American writers. West’s vision of American modernity is terrifyingly comical and diagnoses the tawdriness and meretriciousness of much of American popular culture. His greatest work, Miss Lonelyhearts, which begins this collection, is unique in modern literature.

It describes New York in the early years of the Great Depression through the point of view of an ‘agony aunt’ who corresponds with his suffering readers in the guise of ‘Miss Lonelyhearts: (Are you in trouble? – Do you need advice?)’. A Cool Million is, as its subtitle suggests, the ‘dismantling’ of a myth, here a caustic satire of the ‘rags to riches’ story. West’s final novel, The Day of the Locust, is a comic, yet apocalyptic account of the fantasies of 1930s Hollywood.

This volume concludes with West’s parodic and surreal first venture into fiction, The Dream Life of Balso Snell. Henry Claridge’s introduction to this new edition of West’s fictional writings contextualises his work in the United States of the Great Depression, in his evocation of 1930s Hollywood (where he worked as a writer of screenplays), and in the larger context of his Eastern European Jewish background, and, particularly, his reading of Dostoyesvky. The text comes with extensive annotations, a note on the textual history of West’s writings, and a guide to further reading for both the student and the general reader.

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Liber