Irish Fiction

  • That Old Country Music

    That Old Country Music

    16.95
    Description
    Since his landmark debut collection, There Are Little Kingdoms, and his award-winning second book, Dark Lies the Island, Kevin Barry has been acclaimed as one of the world’s most accomplished and gifted short story writers. In this third collection, That Old Country Music, we encounter a ragbag of west of Ireland characters, many on the cusp between love and catastrophe, heartbreak and epiphany, resignation and hope. These stories show an Ireland in a condition of great flux but also as a place where older rhythms, and an older magic, somehow persist.

    Barry’s lyric intensity, the vitality of his comedy, and the darkness of his vision recall the work of masters of the genre like Flannery O’Connor and William Trevor, but he has forged a style which is patently his own.

  • Trespasses

    Trespasses

    12.50

    * LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2023 *
    * WINNER OF THE AN POST IRISH BOOK AWARDS NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2022 *
    * SHORTLISTED FOR BRITISH BOOK OF THE YEAR: DEBUT FICTION *
    * SHORTLISTED FOR THE WATERSTONES DEBUT FICTION PRIZE 2022 *
    * AN OBSERVER BEST DEBUT NOVELIST OF 2022 *
    * A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK AT BEDTIME *

    One by one, she undid each event, each decision, each choice. If Davy had remembered to put on a coat. If Seamie McGeown had not found himself alone on a dark street.

    If Michael Agnew had not walked through the door of the pub on a quiet night in February in his white shirt. There is nothing special about the day Cushla meets Michael, a married man from Belfast, in the pub owned by her family. But here, love is never far from violence, and this encounter will change both of their lives forever.

    As people get up each morning and go to work, school, church or the pub, the daily news rolls in of another car bomb exploded, another man beaten, killed or left for dead. In the class Cushla teaches, the vocabulary of seven-year-old children now includes phrases like ‘petrol bomb’ and ‘rubber bullets’. And as she is forced to tread lines she never thought she would cross, tensions in the town are escalating, threatening to destroy all she is working to hold together.

    Tender and shocking, Trespasses is an unforgettable debut of people trying to live ordinary lives in extraordinary times.

     

     

  • Life Sentences

    Life Sentences

    14.95
    Description

    The unforgettable tale of love, abandonment, hunger and redemption, from a rising star of Irish fiction

    ‘Eminently readable . . .

    My book of the year so far’ RYAN TUBRIDY

    *****

    At just sixteen, Nancy leaves the small island of Cape Clear for the mainland, the only member of her family to survive the effects of the Great Famine. Finding work in a grand house on the edge of Cork City, she is irrepressibly drawn to the charismatic gardener Michael Egan, sparking a love affair and a devastating chain of events that continues to unfold over three generations. Spanning more than a century, Life Sentences is the unforgettable journey of a family hungry for redemption, and determined against all odds to be free.

    This sweeping story of one family’s fight for survival goes on making the heart lurch long after the final page, and confirms Billy O’Callaghan as one of the finest living Irish writers.

  • Handiwork

    Handiwork

    12.50

    In this contemplative short narrative, artist and acclaimed writer Sara Baume charts the daily process of making and writing, exploring what it is to create and to live as an artist. A short, elegant piece that encompasses images and is itself a significant artifact, handiwork will offer more of the beautiful prose and extraordinary versatility you’ve come to expect from Sara Baume. ‘This little book is a love-child of my art and writing practices, or a by-product of novels past and coming. It’s about the connection between handicraft and bird migration, as well as simply the account of a year spent making hundreds of small, painted objects in an isolated house. It will be my third book with Tramp Press, and I’m thrilled that they continue to support my endeavours.’ – Sara Baume

  • Night Boat to Tangier

    Night Boat to Tangier

    12.50
    Description
    LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZEIRISH TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLERSHORTLISTED FOR NOVEL OF THE YEAR AT THE IRISH BOOK AWARDS, THE DALKEY LITERARY AWARDS AND THE KERRY GROUP AWARDSA BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE NEW YORK TIMES, NEW STATESMAN, TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT, BIG ISSUE, i, THE ATLANTIC and LITERARY HUB’A true wonder’ Max Porter’Beautifully written’ GuardianIt’s late one night at the Spanish port of Algeciras and two fading Irish gangsters are waiting on the boat from Tangier. A lover has been lost, a daughter has gone missing, their world has come asunder – can it be put together again?
  • So Late in the Day

    So Late in the Day

    11.95

    An exquisite new short story from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Small Things Like These and Foster.

    After an uneventful Friday at the Dublin office, Cathal faces into the long weekend and takes the bus home. There, his mind agitates over a woman named Sabine with whom he could have spent his life, had he acted differently.

    All evening, with only the television and a bottle of champagne for company, thoughts of this woman and others intrude – and the true significance of this particular date is revealed. From one of the finest writers working today, Keegan’s new story asks if a lack of generosity might ruin what could be between men and women.

  • Oona

    Oona

    14.95
    Description

    What is the sound of a voice that is alienated from itself? How can one truthfully represent the creative process of an artist? Oona, an artist-in-the-making, lives in an affluent suburban culture of first-generation immigrants in New Jersey where conspicuous consumption and white privilege prevail, and the denial of death is ubiquitous. The silence surrounding death extends to the family home where Oona is not told while her mother lies dying of cancer upstairs. Afterwards, a silence takes hold inside her: her inner life goes into a deep freeze.

    Emotionally hobbled, she has her first encounters with sex, drugs and other trials of adolescence. Lyons’ first novel gives voice to a female character on her fraught journey into adulthood and charts her evolution as an artist, as her adolescent dissociation is thawed through contact with the physical world, the materials of painting and her engagement with Irish community, culture and landscape. Set during the era of the Celtic Tiger and its aftermath, this is a resonant story conveyed in an innovative form.

    Written entirely without the letter ‘o’, the tone of the book reflects Oona’s inner damage and the destruction caused by hiding, omitting and obliterating parts of ourselves.

  • Strange Sally Diamond

    Strange Sally Diamond

    14.95

    From the Number 1 bestselling author of Our Little Cruelties and Skin DeepSally Diamond cannot understand why what she did was so strange. She was only doing what her father told her to do, to put him out with the rubbish when he died. Now Sally is the centre of attention, not only from the hungry media and police detectives, but also a sinister voice from a past she cannot remember.

    As she begins to discover the horrors of her childhood, Sally steps into the world for the first time, making new friends and big decisions, and learning that people don’t always mean what they say. But who is the man observing Sally from the other side of the world? And why does her neighbour seem to be obsessed with her? Sally’s trust issues are about to be severely challenged . . .

     

    ‘I loved every damn second of it’ Lisa Jewell

    ‘Liz Nugent has outdone herself. Twisted and twisty, dark and gripping, no one is going to forget Sally Diamond in a hurry!’ Graham Norton

    ‘Terrific’ Ian Rankin

    ‘So, so good! Sally gets under your skin and worms her way into your heart. I didn’t want it to end’ Jane Fallon

    ‘I’m lost in admiration for Liz and her writing . . . vivid, pacy, taut but so very moving’ Marian Keyes

  • Grown Ups

    Grown Ups

    10.95
    Description
    AT LAST, SOMETHING WORTH STAYING IN FOR . . .

    THE LATEST NO. 1 BESTSELLER FROM MARIAN KEYES ‘Magnificently messy lives, brilliantly untangled. Funny, tender and completely absorbing!’ GRAHAM NORTON ‘SUCH a treat.

    Like reading the cleverest cream cake of words’ CAITLIN MORAN______ MEET JESSIE, CARA AND NELL. Married to brothers Johnny, Ed and Liam Casey. Three very different women tied to three very different men.

    Every family occasion is a party – until the day the secrets spill out. PLAYTIME IS OVER. BUT WHERE ARE THE GROWN-UPS?This book has been printed with four different colour designs: blue, green, pink and orange.

    Covers are assigned to orders at random so we are unable to accept specific requests. ______ ‘Comic, convincing and true. Grown Ups has an almost Austenesque insight into character.

  • Milkman

    Milkman

    12.50

    WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018 SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2019 SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2019 SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION 2019 ‘Blazing.’ Daily Telegraph ‘Outstanding.’ New Statesman ‘A triumph.’ Guardian ‘Utterly compelling.’ The Irish Times ‘The best Booker winner in years.’ Metro

    In an unnamed city, where to be interesting is dangerous, an eighteen-year-old woman has attracted the unwanted and unavoidable attention of a powerful and frightening older man, ‘Milkman’. In this community, where suggestions quickly become fact, where gossip and hearsay can lead to terrible consequences, what can she do to stop a rumour once it has started? Milkman is persistent, the word is spreading, and she is no longer in control …

  • Intermezzo

    Intermezzo

    15.95

    From the author of the multimillion-copy bestseller Normal People, an exquisitely moving story about grief, love and family. Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common. Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties – successful, competent and apparently unassailable.

    But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women – his enduring first love Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke. Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother.

    Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined. For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude – a period of desire, despair and possibility – a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.

  • Falling Animals

    Falling Animals

    15.50

    On an isolated beach set against a lonely, windswept coastline, a pale figure sits serenely against a sand dune staring out to sea.

    His hands are folded neatly in his lap, his ankles are crossed and there is a faint smile on his otherwise lifeless face. Months later, after a fruitless investigation, the nameless stranger is buried in an unmarked grave. But the mystery of his life and death lingers on, drawing the nearby villagers into its wake.

    From strandings to shipwrecks, it is not the first time that strangeness has washed up on their shores. Told through a chorus of voices, Falling Animals follows the crosshatching threads of lives both true and imagined, real and surreal, past and present. Slowly, over great time and distance, the story of one man, alone on a beach, begins to unravel.

    Elegiac and atmospheric, dark and disquieting, Sheila Armstrong s debut novel marks her arrival as one of the most uniquely gifted writers at work in literary fiction today.

  • LeafLight Moon

    LeafLight Moon

    20.00

    PRE -ORDER

    This book will be shipped once available on release (Approx 25th August)

     

    LeafLight Moon – a novel of prehistoric Ireland

    Sligo, 4000 BC: Closely researched and set in the rich prehistoric landscapes of Sligo and the north-west, LeafLight Moon tells the story of the fateful encounter between Ireland’s first farmers and the hunter-gatherers of the Hearth of MotherMountain – the mountain we call Knocknarea.

    For thousands of years, the hunter-gatherers of MotherMountain lived close to the earth, moving through the landscape with the seasons, following her rhythms and keeping her ways. They heard stories of a people who chopped down the greenwood and trapped animals behind fences, but these were only rumours, shiver-tales to share around the fire on long summer nights – until the day when two strangers arrived in a small boat, their skin as pale as downy-birch,

    their eyes as dark as the eyes of seals…

  • Water In The Desert, Fire In The Night

    Water In The Desert, Fire In The Night

    16.00
    Description
    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.

  • Frankie

    Frankie

    15.95

    The brand-new novel from million-copy bestseller and national treasure Graham Norton – a dazzling, decades-sweeping story about love, bravery and what it means to live a significant life.

    Always on the periphery, looking on, young Frankie Howe was never quite sure enough of herself to take centre stage – after all, life had already judged her harshly. Now old, Frankie finds it easier to forget the life that came before. Then Damian, a young Irish carer, arrives at her London flat, there to keep an eye on her as she recovers from a fall.

    A memory is sparked, and the past crackles into life as Damian listens to the story Frankie has kept stored away all these years. Travelling from post-war Ireland to 1960s New York – a city full of art, larger than life characters and turmoil – Frankie shares a world in which friendship and chance encounters collide. A place where, for a while, life blazes with an intensity that can’t last but will perhaps live on in other ways and in other people.

    But as Frankie’s past slowly emerges, her spirit and endurance are revealed as undeniable . . .

  • Love These Days

    Love These Days

    16.95

     

    Only love will save us … Tara Leonard returns after seven years abroad as a humanitarian aid worker to the island where she grew up on the northwest coast of Sligo. Having fled Creevy Island after a wounding marital breakup, she is back only to finalise her divorce. But as her stay on Creevy unexpectedly lengthens, events build to a dangerous reckoning where every ounce of her resourcefulness is tested.