Irish Fiction

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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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A Beautiful Loan
€17.95
My name is Anna, and for some time now, I have been trying to account for certain events in my life – my adult life, that is – which, from this vantage point of forty-five years, I often find baffling . . .

In 1985 Dublin, nineteen-year-old Anna Hughes is in thrall to Peter Gallagher, an older, worldly man. Anna is introverted and naïve, and Peter’s experience, wide circle of friends and thirst for adventure captivate her. Her obsessive longing for him leads to marriage and, eventually, a crushing betrayal.

As Anna’s life becomes less predictable, she uncovers deeper layers of herself. Her journey gives an intimate portrait of a woman embracing herself as she is, claiming the life she yearns for.

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A Bit of a Writer Brendan Behan’s Collected Short Prose
€25.00
Brendan Behan wrote over one hundred articles for Irish newspapers between 1951 and 1956 as he rose to international fame, with most of them written in a weekly column in the Irish Press. The articles reveal a serious writer capable of great comic set pieces and amusing yarns as well as thoughtful reflections on cultural and historical issues. They reflect his passion for working-class Dublin life and the history and folklore of the city, as well as his travels in Ireland and Europe.

This edition gathers all the articles and essays that Behan published in newspapers from 1951 to his death in 1964. Selections of Behan’s articles have been published since his death (Hold Your Hour and Have Another, 1965; After the Wake, 1981; The Dubbalin Man, 1997). However, there has been no complete edition of Behan’s prose, and no edition has provided a detailed biographical and literary introduction, explanatory notes and suggestions for further reading.

This volume is intended for publication during the centenary celebrations of Behan’s birth in 2023, with his birthday being 9 February.

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A Line Made By Walking
€12.50
SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2017
‘When I finished Sara Baume’s new novel I immediately felt sad that I could not send it in the post to the late John Berger. He, too, would have loved it and found great joy in its honesty, its agility, its beauty, its invention. Baume is a writer of outstanding grace and style. She writes beyond the time we live in.’ Colum McCann

Struggling to cope with urban life – and with life in general – Frankie, a twenty-something artist, retreats to the rural bungalow on ‘turbine hill’ that has been vacant since her grandmother’s death three years earlier. It is in this space, surrounded by nature, that she hopes to regain her footing in art and life. She spends her days pretending to read, half-listening to the radio, failing to muster the energy needed to leave the safety of her haven.

Her family come and go, until they don’t and she is left alone to contemplate the path that led her here, and the smell of the carpet that started it all. Finding little comfort in human interaction, Frankie turns her camera lens on the natural world and its reassuring cycle of life and death. What emerges is a profound meditation on the interconnectedness of wilderness, art and individual experience, and a powerful exploration of human frailty.

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A Long Winter
€14.95
Description

An unforgettable story about loss and new love from the bestselling author of Brooklyn and Long Island. ‘The most striking example of Tóibín’s emotional control . .

. [An] eloquent expression of the bond between a mother and a son’ – GuardianOne snowy morning, after arguing with her husband, Miquel’s mother walks out from their home high up in the Pyrenees and does not return. With his younger brother stationed far away on military service and his father cast out by the people of the town, Miquel and his father are left to fend for themselves.

Together they will be forced to battle the elements, and their resentment of each other, through the long winter. Miquel’s desperate searching for his mother is only interrupted when Manolo, an orphaned servant boy from the next village, arrives to help out in the house. As Miquel is forced to confront the reality of his mother’s absence, Manolo, with his silences and longing gaze, offers the promise of new love, and another kind of life.

‘A Long Winter evokes loss, loneliness, guilt and survival in a few masterly strokes’ – Independent

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A Plot To Die For
€16.95
The first in a mystery series from the much-loved Irish actor, writer and comedian, for readers who enjoy the warmth of Graham Norton and the mystery of Death in Paradise, all wrapped up in one small Irish town. When beloved celebrity gardener Finn O’Leary returns to his hometown of Abbeyford in Ireland to care for his aging mother, he is naturally roped into the Tidy Towns committee. The Tidy Towns is a competition fanatically fought over by every town and village in the land. And for his best friend’s sister, Aoife, it’s a competition she’s determined to win.

With everyone’s favourite gardener on board, she is sure that this year Abbeyford will take home the prize. But Finn’s not been back long when an alto-baritone at his mother’s choir practice drops dead during a rendition of ‘What the World Needs Now’. With more at stake than just winning Tidy Towns, Finn soon finds himself trying to solve a murder – or two.

For one of his many qualities is that people tend to confide in him…With his mother, her carer and Aoife in tow, Finn sets out to discover just who has brought murder to Abbeyford. And so it begins.

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A Thousand Moons
€11.95
Description

From the Costa Book of the Year-winning author of Days Without EndEven when you come out of bloodshed and disaster in the end you have got to learn to live. Winona is a young Lakota orphan adopted by former soldiers Thomas McNulty and John Cole. Living with Thomas and John on the farm they work in 1870s Tennessee, she is educated and loved, forging a life for herself beyond the violence and dispossession of her past.

But the fragile harmony of her unlikely family unit, in the aftermath of the Civil War, is soon threatened by a further traumatic event, one which Winona struggles to confront, let alone understand. Told in Sebastian Barry’s rare and masterly prose, A Thousand Moons is a powerful, moving study of one woman’s journey, of her determination to write her own future, and of the enduring human capacity for love. ‘Nobody writes like, nobody takes lyrical risks like, nobody pushes the language, and the heart, and the two together, quite like Sebastian Barry does.’ ALI SMITH

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A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom
€14.95
Description

Some stories are universal. Some are unique. They play out across human history, and time is the river that flows through them.

This story starts with a family. For now, it is a father and a mother with two sons. One with his father’s violence in his blood.

One with his mother’s artistry. One leaves. One stays.

They will be joined by others whose deeds will determine their fate. It is a beginning. Their stories will intertwine and evolve over the course of two thousand years.

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Aisling And The City
€12.95
The brand new, utterly hilarious and totally addictive romantic comedy from the No. 1 bestselling AISLING series. Aisling is 31, and she’s still a complete Aisling. With her cafe BallyGoBrunch flying and the door firmly closed on her relationship with boyfriend John, Aisling accepts an unexpected job offer and boards a business-class flight to New York in her best wrap dress and heels.

As she finds her feet in the Big Apple, she throws herself into the dating game, grapples with ‘always-on’ work culture, forges and fights for new friendships and brings her good wedges to a party in the Hamptons, much to her friend, Sadhbh’s, dismay. But catching up with family and friends on WhatsApp and email is not the same as sitting in Maguire’s putting the world to rights over mini bottles of Pinot Greej and a shared bag of Taytos. And yet New York has so much to offer, not least in the fireman department.

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Aisling Ever After
€14.95
Living in the Big Apple feels like a movie, especially when Aisling finds her ex-boyfriend John on her doorstep. Can his new-found devotion (and his new six-pack!) lure her back home, or should she continue to chase the American dream with the Irish Mafia and Jeff the ridey fireman?Meanwhile, in Ballygobbard, it’s all go. Baby showers are the new hen parties, Mammy and Dr Trevor are more serious than Aisling thought, and the prospect of two evil stepsisters has her doubting her place in the family.

Pulled between head, heart and home, Aisling strives to finally create her own happy ever after.

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Al Them Dogs
€17.95
Description

***SELECTED AS A 2026 BOOK TO WATCH IN THE TIMES, NEW STATESMAN, IRISH TIMES, SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, RTE***

‘One of the debuts of the year’ Irish Times

‘A stylish, adroit and gritty debut’ Anne Enright

‘A book you inhale, devour, grapple with, and reel from more than read’ Marlon James

‘Exhilarating and often frightening . . .

a hugely satisfying read’ Roddy Doyle

‘As beautiful and tough as an uncut jewel’ Colin Walsh

‘A moving, fast-paced novel . . .

written in prose at once glittering and tender’ Sarah Moss

‘Frenetic and exhilarating . . .

has the energy and drama of a shoot-out’ Rob Doyle

Things are different since Tony Ward landed back in town. The West Dublin gangland has changed. His old mentor is dead, and his best pal Kenny Boyle is on the straight and narrow.

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All Along the Echo
€15.95
An absolute marvel’ Max Porter, bestselling author of Lanny
‘Feels like a living thing, dancing and dodging, surprising and poignant’ Lisa McInerney
‘An unruly, provocative and stunning novel’ Cillian Murphy

FIRST VOICE: Why are we listening?
SECOND VOICE: I dunno, I mean, what else is there to do?

Tony Cooney, a local-radio DJ, spends his days on air, talking to the listeners of Cork. They call in to tell him about overturned sewage trucks and nuisance graffiti artists, each story a small testimony to the bustle of life that goes on in the county. Off air, however, Tony is beginning to feel unsettled.

His long marriage is strained, his teenage daughter is struggling with her mental health, and then out of the blue an old girlfriend gets in touch and suggests he come to visit.

Lou Fitzpatrick, Tony’s young radio-show producer, is having her own off-air problems. She wants children, but her girlfriend has other ideas; they’ve lost their beloved cat and her father’s drinking is way past problematic.

Which is why both Tony and Lou are relieved to leave Cork and drive across Ireland as part of a radio publicity stunt organized by a local car dealership. Their aim is to give away the Mazda 2 that they’re driving, the catch being that it must go to one of the many emigrants who have recently returned home to escape a wave of escalating terror attacks in London. But as they navigate dual-carriageways and Travelodges, giving airtime and narrative to the great cacophony of voices calling into the show, the car competition transforms into a surreal quest: Tony to find his first love, Lou to find answers to impossible questions, and all the while two mysterious voices listen in, making their own estimations…

A mighty tale of radios, road trips and of the noisy static of life, All Along the Echo asks us whether our lives ever add up to more than the stories we tell ourselves. Funny, warm and in the wilding spirit of George Saunders or Samuel Beckett, Danny Denton’s novel is a bravura capturing of modern Ireland, one that shows us the possibilities of fiction, the nature of love and death, and what it is for each of us to be only the briefest signal in life’s splendid broadcastttzchidhcmxc [static].

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Apeirogon
€12.50
How do we continue living once we have lost our reason to live? Rami and Bassam live in the city of Jerusalem – but exist worlds apart, divided by an age-old conflict.

And yet they have one thing in common. Both are fathers; both are fathers of daughters – and both daughters are now lost. When Rami and Bassam meet, and tell one another the story of their grief, the most unexpected thing of all happens: they become best of friends.

And their stories become one story, a story with the power to heal – and the power to change the world.

‘The book goes anywhere and everywhere. It is a delirious and thrilling improvisation, a jazz solo spun out of that meeting … A spectacular structure of stories about everything‘ Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times

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Beneath The Cedar Tree
€19.95
Description

Unable to free themselves from a personal trauma six years past, one that has come back to haunt them due to an outrageous miscarriage of justice, Brendan and Irene Gogarty find themselves amongst a planeload of Holy Joes bound for Medjugorje. A pair of agnostics, most unlikely pilgrims, they’re taking a punt on divine deliverance. Medjugorje in 1995 is a spiritual shrine in the middle of a warzone, a ready-made getaway with Vegas-type odds on salvation, but the sacred hill does not deliver.

Overcome with unrealistic hopes for some heavenly sign, Irene has a meltdown on Cross Mountain. Things will never be the same. The couple head for the coast and witness first-hand a country ravaged by conflict before they reach the azure calm of the Adriatic.

Over lazy days in a fishing village the Gogartys begin to unwind. On a whim Brendan decides to buy an old cottage – dubbed the villa – as a gift for Irene. It is perfect except that it is occupied by the auctioneer’s pregnant cousin, Anja, and her severely war-damaged husband, Damir.

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Brouhaha
€14.95
The razor-sharp, violent and darkly comic second novel from actor, comedian and writer Ardal O’Hanlon. Dove Connolly is dead. That’s not good for anyone in Tullyanna, never mind Dove.

Now his best friend Sharkey is home asking awkward questions about Dove’s death, about the strange graphic novel he left behind, and, most of all, about Sandra. Sandra Mohan. Missing now for over a decade, whereabouts unknown.

This, however, is a town dead-set on keeping its secrets. And Sharkey is already drawing attention from all the wrong quarters… A mystery, a black comedy, a satire on Ireland’s tangled politics of memory, Brouhaha is set in a small town on the Irish border during the uneasy transition to peace.

And peace doesn’t come easy in these parts. *****Over the past few days, Kevin, no flies on him, had sensed a tension in the town thanks to Dove Connolly’s poor decision to blow his own head off. It wasn’t just the act of self-harm itself, the pointless splattering of blood and bone and brain all over his bedroom wall, that was the issue, unsettling as that was.

In so doing, poor Dove had spread panic amongst the townspeople, raising all sorts of ugly questions, reviving all sorts of rumours, and inviting all sorts of unwelcome attention upon them. In Kevin’s mind, there was method in Dove’s madness. Showing a shocking assertiveness for possibly the first time in his life, and the last, says you, Dove blew the lid off the whole town.

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Buckeye
€15.95
Description

‘Funny and tender … Patrick Ryan has long been one of my favourite writers’ ANN PATCHETT ‘I love this novel with my entire heart … Wise and heartbreaking’ ANN NAPOLITANOIn the small Ohio town of Bonhomie, Cal Jenkins and Margaret Salt come together in a stolen moment of passion, sparked in the exuberant aftermath of the Allied victory in Europe. Cal’s wife, Becky, has a spiritual gift: she is a seer who can conjure the dead, helping families connect with those whom they’ve lost.

Margaret’s husband, Felix, is serving on a Navy cargo ship; she will soon learn that he may have perished in a predawn attack in the Philippine Sea. But in a small town, nothing stays buried forever, and the consequences of that encounter will ripple through the next generation of both families, compelling them to re-examine who they thought they were – and what the future might hold. Full of compassion, humour and charm, Buckeye is a dazzling portrait of an unforgettable community: of hopes and fears, loves and losses, and above all an indomitable longing for connection.

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