Irish Fiction

  • 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

  • Tell Me What I Am

    Tell Me What I Am

    15.95

    Deena Garvey disappeared in 2004. She left behind a daughter and a sister. Deena’s daughter grows up in the country.

    She learns how to hunt, when to seed the garden, how to avoid making her father angry. Never to ask about her absent mother. Deena’s sister stays stuck in the city, getting desperate.

    She knows the man responsible for her sister’s disappearance, but she can’t prove it. Not yet. Over fourteen years, four hundred miles apart, these two women slowly begin to unearth the secrets and lies at the heart of their family, and the history of power and control that has shaped them both in such different ways.

    But can they reach each other in time? And will the truth finally answer the question of their lives: What really happened to Deena Garvey?

  • Old God's Time

    Old God’s Time

    15.95

    Recently retired policeman Tom Kettle is settling into the quiet of his new home, a lean-to annexed to a Victorian castle overlooking the Irish Sea. For months he has barely seen a soul, catching only glimpses of his eccentric landlord and a nervous young mother who has moved in next door.

    Occasionally, fond memories return, of his family, his beloved wife June and their two children. But when two former colleagues turn up at his door with questions about a decades-old case, one which Tom never quite came to terms with, he finds himself pulled into the darkest currents of his past. A beautiful, haunting novel, in which nothing is quite as it seems, Old God’s Time is about what we live through, what we live with, and what may survive of us.

  • Ruth + Pen

    Ruth + Pen

    15.00
    Description

    The brilliant debut novel from Emilie Pine, author of the international bestseller NOTES TO SELF

    Dublin, 7 October 2019

    One day, one city, two women: Ruth and Pen. Neither known to the other, but both asking themselves the same questions: how to be with others and how, when the world doesn’t seem willing to make space for them, to be with themselves?

    Ruth’s marriage to Aidan is in crisis. Today she needs to make a choice – to stay or not to stay, to take the risk of reaching out, or to pull up the drawbridge.

    For teenage Pen, today is the day the words will flow, and she will speak her truth to Alice, to ask for what she so desperately wants.

    Deeply involving, poignant and radiantly intelligent, it is a portrait of the limits of grief and love, of how we navigate our inner and outer landscapes, and the tender courage demanded by the simple, daily quest of living.

  • Seven Steeples

    Seven Steeples

    14.95

    The mountain remained, unclimbed, for the first year that they lived there. Bell and Sigh, a couple in the infancy of their relationship, cut themselves off from friends and family. They turn their backs on a city divided by scores of streets and hundreds of sterile cherry trees, by a foul river and a declining population of house sparrows.

    Them in and the world out. From the top of the nearby mountain, they are told, you can see seven standing stones, seven schools, and seven steeples. All you have to do is climb.

    Taking place in a remote house in the south-west of Ireland, this rich and vivid novel spans seven years and speaks to the times we live in, asking how we may withdraw, how better to live in the natural world, and how the choices made or avoided lead us home.

  • Homesickness

    Homesickness

    12.95

    From the prize-winning author of YOUNG SKINS, comes HOMESICKNESS – a quietly caustic, startlingly beautiful and wonderfully wry new short story collection.

    A mesmerisingly powerful book, full of the strangeness and beauty of life‘ Sally Rooney

    Addictive, stylish and violently funny… An outstanding collection‘ Kevin Barry

    In these eight stories, Barrett takes us back to the barren backwaters of County Mayo, via Toronto, and illuminates the lives of outcasts, misfits and malcontents with an eye for the abrupt and absurd.

    A quiet night in the neighbourhood pub is shattered by the arrival of a sword wielding fugitive. A funeral party teeters on the edge of this world and the next, as ghosts won’t simply lay in wake. A shooting sees an everyday call-out lead a policewoman to confront the banality of her own existence.

    A true follow-up to his electrifying debut collection, HOMESICKNESS marks Colin Barrett out as our most brilliantly original and captivating storyteller.

  • Aisling And The City

    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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    That Old Country Music

    12.50

    Description
    LONGLISTED FOR THE EDGE HILL SHORT STORY PRIZE’One of the best collections you’ll read this year’ Sunday Times’Wild, witty stories . . .

    Exhilarating’ ObserverIn this rapturous story collection 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 affirm Kevin Barry as one of the world’s most accomplished and gifted writers, and show an Ireland in a condition of great flux but also as a place where older rhythms, and an older magic, somehow persist.

  • The Fixer

    The Fixer

    13.95

    Description
    Meet Meg Monroe, the fixer. If you want to get rid of someone you call Meg. (No, not like that – this would be a very different book!) Using her brilliant intuition, people reading skills and with masterful manipulation Meg befriends her mark and tells them what they want to hear, using it to convince them to see the error of their ways.

    She’s never once found a case she can’t handle – affairs, clingy former-friends, useless employees and exes that can’t take the hint. But when a blast from the past turns up on Meg’s doorstep, will she get caught in her own web of lies?

  • The Echo Chamber

    The Echo Chamber

    14.95

    Description
    What a thing of wonder a mobile phone is. Six ounces of metal, glass and plastic, fashioned into a sleek, shiny, precious object. At once, a gateway to other worlds – and a treacherous weapon in the hands of the unwary, the unwitting, the inept.

    The Cleverley family live a gilded life, little realising how precarious their privilege is, just one tweet away from disaster.

    George, the patriarch, is a stalwart of television interviewing, a ‘national treasure’ (his words), his wife Beverley, a celebrated novelist (although not as celebrated as she would like), and their children, Nelson, Elizabeth, Achilles, various degrees of catastrophe waiting to happen.

    Together they will go on a journey of discovery through the Hogarthian jungle of the modern living where past presumptions count for nothing and carefully curated reputations can be destroyed in an instant. Along the way they will learn how volatile, how outraged, how unforgiving the world can be when you step from the proscribed path.

  • The Glorious Guinness Girls

    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.

  • Exciting Times

    Exciting Times

    10.95

    Description
    ‘The book of the summer … Kept me rapt until the final page’ THE TIMES’A sharp, smart, witty modern love story. I loved it’ David Nicholls, author of ONE DAY’More than lives up to the hype …

    Likely to fill the Sally-Rooney-shaped hole in many readers’ lives’ IRISH TIMES’Droll, shrewd and unafraid – a winning debut’ Hilary Mantel, author of WOLF HALL’I’ve been pushing Exciting Times on everyone I know. Some of Dolan’s pithy observations of her characters are the best I’ve read since Edward St Aubyn’ OBSERVER’A frankly sensational book’ Pandora Sykes on THE HIGH LOW’In the tradition of Dorothy Parker, Joan Rivers and Nora Ephron … I found myself purring with pleasure.

  • A Thousand Moons

    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

  • 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