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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.
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.
Nell – funny, brave and so much loved – is a young woman with adventure on her mind. As she sets out into the world, she finds her family history hard to escape.
For her mother, Carmel, Nell’s leaving home opens a space in her heart, where the turmoil of a lifetime begins to churn. And across the generations falls the long shadow of Carmel’s famous father, an Irish poet of beautiful words and brutal actions.
This is a meditation on love: spiritual, romantic, darkly sexual or genetic. A multigenerational novel that traces the inheritance not just of trauma but also of wonder, it is a testament to the glorious resilience of women in the face of promises false and true.
Above all, it is an exploration of the love between mother and daughter – sometimes fierce, often painful, but always transcendent.
Following the death of her best friend, Erin has to get out of London. Returning home to Belfast, an au pair job provides a partial refuge from her grief and her volatile relationship with her mother. Erin spends late nights at the bar where her childhood friend, Declan, works.
There she meets an American academic who is also looking to get lost. Parallel to this she reconnects with an old flame, Mikey. This brings its own web of complications.
With a startlingly fresh and original voice – jarringly funny, cranky, often hungover – Lazy City depicts the strange, meandering aftermath that follows disaster.
One house. Three strangers. A second chance at happiness.
Tessa’s life as an activist and volunteer worker takes a hit after a fall. At the ripe young age of 69, she’s no longer able to live alone and decides to take in two lodgers for free. After the recent death of his brother, Conn is riddled with grief and determined to make amends.
A free room seems too good to be true – until he meets the other lodger. Chloe arrives at Tessa’s house to deliver a package and leaves with a room. But she takes an instant dislike to Conn, who refuses to say where he disappears to at night.
With everyone so busy keeping their own secrets, the mysterious package is forgotten. It’s addressed to Tessa’s daughter who’s been missing for 10 years – and only the contents have the answer to what happened …
From an exciting new voice in Irish fiction, a powerful novel set on an Irish clifftop – a story about duty, despair and the chance encounters upon which fate turns. Micheal Burns lives alone in his family’s bungalow at the end of Kerry Head in Ireland. It is a picturesque place, but the cliffs have a darker side to them: for generations they have been a suicide black spot.
Micheal’s mother saw the saving of these lost souls – these visitors – as her spiritual duty, and now, in the wreckage of his life, Micheal finds himself continuing her work. When his sisters tell him that they want to sell the land, he must choose between his siblings and the visitors, a future or a past.
Home is where the heart is but what if that home has been erased?
Discharged from a psychiatric ward after an apparent murder-suicide perpetrated by her partner Malachy, feared drowned, Helena is driven to the beautiful peninsula of Islandmagee, north of Belfast, by new friends Jer and Nora McCabe. There she finds the house she shared with Malachy has been cleared off the face of the earth . . . or so she claims.
Maverick TV producer and investigative journalist Jer wonders whether Helena is victim or villain, but tries to help for the sake of his vulnerable wife who has befriended this unsettling woman.
Amid echoes of the infamous Islandmagee witch trial, Jer and his family are drawn into a disturbing chain of events which reach their climax on an Islandmagee hillside on Halloween night.
The Rachel Incident is an all-consuming love story.
But it’s not the one you’re expecting. It’s unconventional and messy. It’s young and foolish.
It’s about losing and finding yourself. But it is always about love.
When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr Byrne, her best friend James helps her devise a plan to seduce him. But what begins as a harmless crush soon pushes their friendship to its limits.
Over the course of a year they will find their lives ever more entwined with the Byrnes’ and be faced with impossible choices and a lie that can’t be taken back…
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.
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.
Jamie O’Neill loves the colour red. He also loves tall trees, patterns, rain that comes with wind, the curvature of many objects, books with dust jackets, cats, rivers and Edgar Allan Poe. At age 13 there are two things he especially wants in life: to build a Perpetual Motion Machine, and to connect with his mother Noelle, who died when he was born.
In his mind these things are intimately linked. And at his new school, where all else is disorientating and overwhelming, he finds two people who might just be able to help him.
How to Build a Boat is the story of how one boy and his mission transforms the lives of his teachers, Tess and Tadhg, and brings together a community. Written with tenderness and verve, it’s about love, family and connection, the power of imagination, and how our greatest adventures never happen alone.
When Hannah learns that famed chef Daniel Costello is facing accusations of sexual assault, she’s thrown back to the summer she spent waitressing at his high-end Dublin restaurant – the plush splendour of the dining rooms, the wild parties after service, the sizzling tension of the kitchens.
But Hannah also remembers how the attention from Daniel soon morphed from kindness into something darker. Now the restaurant is shuttered and Daniel is faced with the reality of a courtroom. His wife Julie is hiding from paparazzi lenses behind the bedroom curtains.
Surrounded by the wreckage of the past, Daniel, Julie and Hannah are all forced to reconsider what happened at the restaurant. Their three different voices reveal a story of power and complicity, of the lies that we tell and the courage that it takes to face the truth.
Luminous and devastating, a portrait of modern masculinity as shaped by class, by trauma, and by silence, but also by the courage to love and to surviveSean’s brother Anthony is a hard man. When they were kids their ma did her best to keep him out of trouble but you can’t say anything to Anto. Sean was supposed to be different.
He was supposed to leave and never come back. But Sean does come back. Arriving home after university, he finds Anthony’s drinking is worse than ever.
Meanwhile the jobs in Belfast have vanished, Sean’s degree isn’t worth the paper it’s written on and no one will give him the time of day. One night he loses control and assaults a stranger at a party, and everything is tipped into chaos. Close to Home witnesses the aftermath of that night, as Sean attempts to make sense of who he has become, and to reckon with the relationships that have shaped him, for better and worse.
Drawing from his own experiences, Michael Magee examines the forces which keep young working class men in harm’s way, in a debut novel which shines with intelligence and humanity on every page. Close to Home is an extraordinary work of fiction about deciding what kind of a man you want to be and finding your place in the scarred city you call home.
Carol is a divorced teacher living in a small town in Ireland, her only son now grown.
A second chance at love brings her unexpected connection and belonging. The new relationship sparks local speculation: what does a woman like her see in a man like that? What happened to his wife who abandoned them all those years ago? But the gossip only serves to bring the couple closer. When Declan becomes ill, things start to fall apart.
His children are untrusting and cruel, and Carol is forced to leave their beloved home with its worn oak floors and elegant features and move back in with her parents. Carol’s mother is determined to get to the bottom of things, she won’t see her daughter suffer in this way. It seems there are secrets in Declan’s past, strange rumours that were never confronted and suddenly the house they shared takes on a more sinister significance.
In his tense and darkly comic new novel Norton casts a light on the relationship between mothers and daughters, and truth and self-preservation with unnerving effect.
A wildly original debut novel about two young women navigating the complex worlds of Andy Warhol’s Factory, and coming of age in 1960s New York.
New York City, 1966. Seventeen-year-old Mae lives in a run-down apartment with her alcoholic mother and her mother’s sometimes-boyfriend, Mikey. She is turned off by the petty girls at her high school, and the sleazy men she typically meets.
When she drops out, she is presented with a job offer that will remake her world entirely: she is hired as a typist for the artist Andy Warhol. Warhol is composing an unconventional novel by recording the conversations and experiences of his many famous and alluring friends. Tasked with transcribing these tapes alongside several other girls, Mae quickly befriends Shelley and the two of them embark on a surreal adventure at the fringes of the countercultural movement.
Going to parties together, exploring their womanhood and sexuality, this should be the most enlivening experience of Mae’s life. But as she grows increasingly obsessed with the tapes and numb to her own reality, Mae must grapple with the thin line between art and voyeurism and determine how she can remain her own person as the tide of the sixties sweeps over her. Nothing Special is a whip-smart coming-of-age story about friendship, independence and the construction of art and identity, bringing to life the experience of young women in this iconic and turbulent moment.
A 2023 HIGHLIGHT FOR: THE TIMES * TELGRAPH * STYLIST * GQ * GUARDIAN * HARPER’S BAZAAR * GOOD HOUSEKEEPING * WATERSTONES * i-D * IRISH TIMES * HUFFINGTON POST UK
‘I truly love Nicole Flattery’s writing’ SALLY ROONEY
‘In enviably elegant prose, she manages to be both arch and deadly serious’ LOUISE KENNEDY
‘A wry, witty and wonderful novel from a brilliantly captivating storyteller’ JOSEPH O’CONNOR