Irish Fiction

  • 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

  • Hiding From The Heart

    Hiding From The Heart

    15.95

    She left to find freedom, only to discover everything she needed was waiting at home.

    At seventeen, Colette Keogh wants nothing more than to escape. Escape the family farm in the west of Ireland. Escape her mother’s criticism. Escape a future that feels like it’s already been written. But when her father suffers a stroke, her plans turn to dust. School is over. The city must wait. The farm – and her family – need her now.

    Then Robbie enters her life. Kind, steady and nothing like the boys she’s known before, Robbie makes Colette feels seen for the first time. But one tragic decision and a wave of grief upend everything. Robbie is gone, and Colette is left to navigate a life she no longer recognises.

    A move to Dublin promises the glamour Colette longs for, but the reality is far from what she imagined. And when a new friendship reignites her connection to the land, Colette begins to wonder if the life she ran from was the one she was meant to build all along.

    Hiding from the Heart is a tender, emotionally rich story of first love, family duty and the quiet power of coming 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.

  • How To Build A Boat

    How To Build A Boat

    17.50

    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.

  • I Want To Know That I Will Be Okay

    I Want To Know That I Will Be Okay

    13.00
    Description
    In this dark, glittering collection of short stories, Deirdre Sullivan explores the trauma and power that reside in women’s bodies. A teenage girl tries to fit in at a party held in a haunted house, with unexpected and disastrous consequences. A mother and daughter run a thriving online business selling antique dolls, while their customers get more than they bargained for.

    And after a stillbirth, a young woman discovers that there is something bizarre and wondrous growing inside of her. With empathy and invention, Sullivan effortlessly blends genres in stories that are by turns strange and exquisite. Already established as an award-winning writer for children and young adults, I Want to Know That I Will Be Okay marks her arrival as a captivating new voice in literary fiction.

  • 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.

  • Juno Loves Legs

    Juno Loves Legs

    15.95

    She’s loved him since their first encounter at school in Dublin, where she fought the playground bullies for him.

    He feels brave with her, she feels safe with him, and together they feel invincible, even if the world has other ideas. The two find their way from the backstreets and city’s pubs to its underground parties and squats, where, on the verge of adulthood, they find a breathing space to begin their real lives. Only Legs’s might be taking him somewhere Juno can’t follow.

    Set during the political and social unrest of the 1980s, as families struggled to survive and their children struggled to be free, this beautiful, vivid novel of childhood friendship is about being young, being hurt, being seen and, most of all, being loved. ‘A heartbreaker, and absolutely unforgettable’ DONAL RYAN, bestselling author of The Queen of Dirt Island’This will break your heart in the very best way and leave you laughing in spite of yourself. A backstreet epic.

  • Kala

    Kala

    17.50

    In the seaside town of Kinlough, on Ireland’s west coast, three old friends are thrown together for the first time in years. They – Helen, Joe and Mush – were part of an original group of six inseparable teenagers in the summer of 2003, with motherless, reckless Kala Lanann as their group’s white-hot centre.

    Soon after that summer’s peak, Kala disappeared without a trace.

    Now it’s fifteen years later. Human remains have been discovered in the woods. Two more girls have gone missing.

    As past and present begin to collide, the estranged friends are forced to confront their own complicity in the events that led to Kala’s disappearance, and to try to stop Kinlough’s violent patterns repeating themselves once again …

    Against the backdrop of a town suffocating on its own secrets, in a story that builds from a smoulder to a stunning climax, Kala brilliantly examines the sometimes brutal costs of belonging, as well as the battle in the human heart between vengeance and forgiveness, despair and redemption.

  • Lazy City

    Lazy City

    16.50

    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.

  • 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…

  • 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.

  • Line

    Line

    13.95

    Willard, his mother and his girlfriend Nyla have spent their entire lives in an endless journey where daily survival is dictated by the ultimate imperative: obey the rules, or you will lose your place in the Line. Everything changes the day Willards mother dies and he finds an incomprehensible book hidden among her few belongings… In its Beckettian sparseness, Line pushes the boundaries of speculative, high concept fiction. Deeply moving, it also touches on many of the pressing issues of our turbulent world: migration and the refugee crisis, big data and the erosion of democracy, climate change, colonialism, economic exploitation, social conformity and religious fanaticism. A stunning debut from a major new voice in Irish literature.

  • 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.

  • 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 …

  • My Father's House

    My Father’s House

    16.95

    When the Nazis take Rome, thousands go into hiding. One priest will risk everything to save them. September 1943: German forces occupy Rome.

    SS officer Paul Hauptmann rules with terror. An Irish priest, Hugh O’Flaherty, dedicates himself to helping those escaping from the Nazis. His home is Vatican City, a neutral, independent country within Rome where the occupiers hold no sway.

    He gathers a team to set up an Escape Line. But Hauptmann’s net begins closing in and the need for a terrifyingly audacious mission grows critical. By Christmas, it’s too late to turn back.

    Based on a true story, My Father’s House is a powerful thriller from a master of historical fiction. It is an unforgettable novel of love, sacrifice and what it means to be human in the most extreme circumstances.

  • My Favourite Mistake

    My Favourite Mistake

    16.95

    Anna has just lost her taste for the Big Apple…

    She has a life to envy. An apartment in New York. A well-meaning (too well-meaning?) partner.

    And a high-flying job in beauty PR. Who wouldn’t want all that?
    Anna, it turns out.

    Trading a minor midlife crisis for a major life event, she switches the skyscrapers of Manhattan for the tiny Irish town of Maumtully (population 1,217), helping old friends Brigit and Colm set up a luxury coastal retreat.

    Tougher than it sounds. Newflash: the locals hate the idea.

    So much so, there have been threats – and violence.

    Anna, however, worked in the beauty industry. There’s no ugliness she hasn’t seen. No wrinkle she can’t smooth over.

    There’s just one fly in the ointment – old flame Joey Armstrong.

    He’s going to be her wingman.
    Never mind their chequered history.

    Never mind what might have been.

    Because no matter how far you go, your mistakes will still be waiting for you . . .