Historical Fiction

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A Whisper from Oblivion
€23.95
The follow-up to The Pawnbroker’s Reward, his bestselling 2021 novel, Declan O’Rourke’s second instalment sees the inhabitants of Macroom and its surroundings landed squarely into the eye of the storm that is 1847, during Ireland’s Great Famine. After the landslide of their descent through 1846, Padraig and Cait Ua Buachalla awaken on the outskirts of Macroom to a new year fraught with the worst of weather, worse luck and a new level of problems that compound their desperate struggle to survive. In the heart of town, in the absence of her husband the pawnbroker, Paulellen Creed struggles to stay afloat.

Follow this heart-wrenching story of tragedy and human beauty as, through the voices of Macroom in 1847, we hear a whisper from oblivion.

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Learned By Heart
€18.00
The daughter of an Indian mother and a British father, Eliza was banished from Madras to this unfamiliar country at the age of six. At the Manor School she keeps her head down and follows all the rules, until the arrival of a charismatic and fearless new student, Anne Lister. The two outsiders are thrown together and soon Elizas life is turned upside down by this remarkable young woman.

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The Moon Gate
€17.50
1939: On the eve of war, young English heiress Grace Grey travels from London to the wilderness of Tasmania.

Coaxed out of her shell by the attentions of her Irish neighbour, Daniel – Grace finally learns to live. But when Australian forces are called to the frontline, and Daniel with them, he leaves behind a devastating secret which will forever bind them together.

1975: Artist Willow Hawkins, and her new husband, Ben, can’t believe their luck when an anonymous benefactor leaves them a house on the remote Tasmanian coast. Confused and delighted, they set out to unmask Towerhurst’s previous owner – unwittingly altering the course of their lives.

2004: Libby Andrews has always been sheltered from the truth behind her father Ben’s death.

When she travels to London and discovers a faded photograph, a long-buried memory is unlocked, and she begins to follow an investigation that Ben could never complete. But will she realise that some secrets are best left buried . . .?

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Ancestry
€12.50
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL FICTION

Almost two hundred years ago, Abraham, an illiterate urchin, scavenges on a Suffolk beach and dreams of running away to sea … Naomi, a seventeen-year-old seamstress, imagines a new life in the big city … George, a private soldier of the 50th Regiment of Food, marries his Irish bride, Annie, in the cathedral in Manchester and together they face married life under arms.

Now these people exist only in the bare bones of registers and census lists but they were once real enough. Simon Mawer puts flesh on our ancestors’ bones to bring them to life and give them voice. There is birth and death; there is love, both open and legal but also hidden and illicit.

Yet the thread that connects these disparate figures is something that they cannot have known – the unbreakable bond of family.

‘Utterly absorbing, cleverly constructed and beautifully written’ The Times

‘Moving and exhilarating’ Spectator

‘Evokes the messiness and fragility of everyday life in the nineteenth century’ Daily Mail

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The Marriage Portrait
€13.95
Marriage was her destiny. Now she must survive it. The Marriage Portrait is a dazzling evocation of the Italian Renaissance in all its beauty and brutality.

Winter, 1561. Lucrezia, Duchess of Ferrara, is taken on an unexpected visit to a country villa by her husband, Alfonso. As they sit down to dinner it occurs to Lucrezia that Alfonso has a sinister purpose in bringing her here.

He intends to kill her. Lucrezia is sixteen years old, and has led a sheltered life locked away inside Florence’s grandest palazzo. Here, in this remote villa, she is entirely at the mercy of her increasingly erratic husband.

What is Lucrezia to do with this sudden knowledge? What chance does she have against Alfonso, ruler of a province, and a trained soldier? How can she ensure her survival? The Marriage Portrait is an unforgettable reimagining of the life of a young woman whose proximity to power places her in mortal danger.

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The Whalebone Theatre
€12.50
This is the story of an old English manor house by the sea, with crumbling chimneys, draping ivy and a library full of dusty hardbacks. It’s the story of the three children who grow up there, and the adventures they create for themselves while the grown-ups entertain endless party guests: the worlds they imagine from books they aren’t supposed to read, and the lessons they learn from eavesdropping through oak-panelled doors. This is the story of a whale that washes up on a beach, whose bones are claimed by a twelve-year-old girl with big ambitions and an even bigger imagination.

An unwanted orphan who grows into an unmarriageable young woman, chafing under the confines of her traditional upbringing and fiercely determined to do things differently. But as the children grow to adulthood, another story has been unfolding in the wings. And when the war finally takes centre stage, they find themselves cast, unrehearsed, into roles they never expected to play.

They raised themselves on stories. Now it’s time for them to write their own …

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The Glorious Guinness Girls
€11.50
The Glorious Guinness Girls are the toast of London and Dublin society. Darlings of the press, Aileen, Maureen and Oonagh lead charmed existences that are the envy of many.

But Fliss knows better. Sent to live with them as a child, she grows up as part of the family and only she knows of the complex lives beneath the glamorous surface.

Then, at a party one summer’s evening, something happens which sends shockwaves through the entire household.

In the aftermath, as the Guinness sisters move on, Fliss is forced to examine her place in their world and decide if where she finds herself is where she truly belongs.

Set amid the turmoil of the Irish Civil War and the brittle glamour of 1920s London, The Glorious Guinness Girls is inspired by one of the most fascinating family dynasties in the world – an unforgettable novel of reckless youth, family loyalty and destiny.

If you loved Downton Abbey, Julian Fellowes’ Belgravia or Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife, you will adore The Glorious Guinness Girls.

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The Pull of the Stars
€11.50
Dublin, 1918. In a country doubly ravaged by war and disease, Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city centre, where expectant mothers who have come down with an unfamiliar flu are quarantined together. Into Julia’s regimented world step two outsiders: Doctor Kathleen Lynn, on the run from the police, and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney.

In the darkness and intensity of this tiny ward, over the course of three days, these women change each other’s lives in unexpected ways. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic, but they also shepherd new life into a fearful world. With tireless tenderness and humanity, carers and mothers alike somehow do their impossible work.

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The Mirror and the Light
€13.50
England, May 1536. Anne Boleyn is dead, decapitated in the space of a heartbeat by a hired French executioner.

As her remains are bundled into oblivion, Thomas Cromwell breakfasts with the victors. The blacksmith’s son from Putney emerges from the spring’s bloodbath to continue his climb to power and wealth, while his formidable master, Henry VIII, settles to short-lived happiness with his third queen, Jane Seymour. Cromwell is a man with only his wits to rely on; he has no great family to back him, no private army.

Despite rebellion at home, traitors plotting abroad and the threat of invasion testing Henry’s regime to breaking point, Cromwell’s robust imagination sees a new country in the mirror of the future. But can a nation, or a person, shed the past like a skin? Do the dead continually unbury themselves? What will you do, the Spanish ambassador asks Cromwell, when the king turns on you, as sooner or later he turns on everyone close to him?

With The Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel brings to a triumphant close the trilogy she began with Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. She traces the final years of Thomas Cromwell, the boy from nowhere who climbs to the heights of power, offering a defining portrait of predator and prey, of a ferocious contest between present and past, between royal will and a common man’s vision: of a modern nation making itself through conflict, passion and courage.

Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020; Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2020;

‘Mantel has taken us to the dark heart of history … and what a show‘ The Times

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The Devil and the Dark Water
€12.50
Three impossible crimes. Two unlikely detectives. One deadly voyage. It’s 1634 and Samuel Pipps, the world’s greatest detective, is being transported from the Dutch East Indies to Amsterdam, where he is set to face trial for a crime that no one dares speak of. But no sooner is the ship out to sea than devilry begins to blight the voyage.

Strange symbols appear on the sails. A figure stalks the decks. Livestock are slaughtered.

Passengers are plagued with ominous threats, promising them three unholy miracles. First: an impossible pursuit. Second: an impossible theft.

Then: an impossible murder. With Pipps imprisoned in the depths of the ship, can his loyal bodyguard, Arent Hayes, solve the mystery before the ship descends into anarchy?

From the author of the dazzling The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, winner of the Costa Best First Novel Award, comes an adventurous and wildly entertaining murder mystery.

‘Think of a Holmes and Watson-style duo operating in a Pirates Of The Caribbean-style universe‘ Metro

‘A glorious mash-up of William Golding and Arthur Conan Doyle‘ Val McDermid

‘A superb historical mystery: inventive, twisty, addictive and utterly beguiling … A TRIUMPH‘ Will Dean

CHOSEN AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE GUARDIAN, SUNDAY TIMES, DAILY MAIL, FINANCIAL TIMES, DAILY EXPRESS AND i PAPER; LONGLISTED FOR THE CWA IAN FLEMING STEEL DAGGER AWARD

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To Calais, in Ordinary Time
€12.50
Three journeys. One road. England, 1348.

A gentlewoman flees an odious arranged marriage, a proctor sets out for a monastery in Avignon and a young ploughman in search of freedom is on his way to volunteer with a company of archers. All come together on the road to Calais. In the other direction comes the Black Death, the plague that will wipe out half of the population of Northern Europe.

To Calais, In Ordinary Time is an exploration of love, death and power, against the backdrop of catastrophe.

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Bring Up the Bodies
€12.50
By 1535 Thomas Cromwell is Chief Minister to Henry VIII, his fortunes having risen with those of Anne Boleyn, the king’s new wife. But Anne has failed to give the king an heir, and Cromwell watches as Henry falls for plain Jane Seymour.

Cromwell must find a solution that will satisfy Henry, safeguard the nation and secure his own career. But neither minister nor king will emerge unscathed from the bloody theatre of Anne’s final days. An astounding literary accomplishment, Bring Up the Bodies is the story of this most terrifying moment of history, by one of our greatest living novelists.

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So Much Life Left Over
€10.95
A heartbreaking story of love, loss and survival from the multi-million copy bestselling author of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Returning from life as a fighter pilot in the First World War, Daniel is struggling to put the trauma of the Western Front behind him. As the 1920s dawn, he and his wife Rosie move to a tea plantation in Ceylon with their small daughter to make a fresh start.

Yet navigating their new world could test their marriage to its limits. Back in England, Rosie’s sisters are dealing with impossible challenges in their searches for family, purpose and happiness. These are precarious times, and taking unconventional means may be the only way to get what they want.

Around them the world changes, and events in Germany take a dark and forbidding turn. And soon there is no going back…

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The Garden of Evening Mists
€12.50
THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER, SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE, WINNER OF THE MAN ASIAN LITERARY PRIZE, WINNER OF THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE
Teoh Yun Ling was seventeen years old when she first heard about Aritomo and the garden. But a war would come to Malaya, and a decade pass before she would travel to see him. A man of extraordinary skill and reputation, Aritomo was once the gardener for the Emperor of Japan, and now Yun Ling needs him.

She needs him to help her build a memorial to her beloved sister, killed at the hands of the Japanese. She wants to learn everything Aritomo can teach her, and do her sister proud, but to do so she must also begin a journey into her own past, a past inextricably linked with the secrets of her troubled country. A story of art, war, love and memory, The Garden of Evening Mists captures a dark moment in history with richness, power and incredible beauty.

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