Irish Interest

  • The Great Irish Bucket List

    The Great Irish Bucket List

    12.95
  • Wild Atlantic Women

    Wild Atlantic Women

    12.95

    At a crossroads in her life, Gráinne Lyons set out to travel Ireland’s west coast on foot. She set a simple intention: to walk in the footsteps of eleven pioneering Irish women deeply rooted in this coastal landscape and explore their lives and work along the way. As a Londoner born to Irish parents, she also sought answers in her own identity.

    As Gráinne heads north from Cape Clear Island where her great-grandmother was a lacemaker, she considers Ellen Hutchins, Maude Delap, Edna O’Brien, Granuaile and Queen Maeve among others from her unique perspective. Their homes – in places that are famously wild and remote – are transformed into sites of hope, purpose, opportunity and inspiration. Walking through this history, her journey reveals unexpected insight into emigrant identity, travelling alone, femininity and the trappings of an ‘ideal’ life.

    Against the backdrop and power of this great ocean, Wild Atlantic Women will inspire the twenty-first-century reader and walker to keep going, regardless of the path.

  • Constellations

    Constellations

    13.50
    Description
    *Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2020**Winner of non-fiction book of the year at the Irish Book Awards*’Utterly magnificent. Raw, thought-provoking and galvanising; this is a book every woman should read.’ -Eimear McBride, author of A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing. I have come to think of all the metal in my body as artificial stars, glistening beneath the skin, a constellation of old and new metal.
  • Rememberings

    Rememberings

    13.50

    THE LANDMARK MEMOIR OF A GLOBAL MUSIC ICON

    Sinead O’Connor’s voice and trademark shaved head made her famous by the age of twenty-one. Her recording of Prince’s ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ made her a global icon. She outraged millions when she tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on American television.

    O’Connor was unapologetic and impossible to ignore, calling out hypocrisy wherever she saw it. She has remained that way for three decades. Now, in Rememberings, O’Connor tells her story – the heartache of growing up in a family falling apart; her early forays into the Dublin music scene; her adventures and misadventures in the world of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll; the fulfilment of being a mother; her ongoing spiritual quest – and through it all, her abiding passion for music.

    Rememberings is intimate, replete with candid anecdotes and full of hard-won insights. It is a unique and remarkable chronicle by a unique and remarkable artist.

  • Great Hatred

    Great Hatred

    13.50

    A gripping investigation into one of Irish history’s greatest mysteries, Great Hatred reveals the true story behind one of the most significant political assassinations to ever have been committed on British soil.

    ‘Heart-stopping . . . The book is both forensic and a page-turner, and ultimately deeply tragic, for Ireland as much as for the murder victim.‘ MICHAEL PORTILLO

    On 22 June 1922, Sir Henry Wilson – the former head of the British army and one of those credited with winning the First World War – was shot and killed by two veterans of that war turned IRA members in what was the most significant political murder to have taken place on British soil for more than a century.

    His assassins were well-educated and pious men. One had lost a leg during the Battle of Passchendaele. Shocking British society to the core, the shooting caused consternation in the government and almost restarted the conflict between Britain and Ireland that had ended with the Anglo-Irish Treaty just five months earlier.

    Wilson’s assassination triggered the Irish Civil War, which cast the darkest of shadows over the new Irish State. Who ordered the killing? Why did two English-born Irish nationalists kill an Irish-born British imperialist? What was Wilson’s role in the Northern Ireland government and the violence which matched the intensity of the Troubles fifty years later? Why would Michael Collins, who risked his life to sign a peace treaty with Great Britain, want one of its most famous soldiers dead, and how did the Wilson assassination lead to Collins’ tragic death in an ambush two months later?

    Drawing upon newly released archival material and never-before-seen documentation, Great Hatred is a revelatory work that sheds light on a moment that changed the course of Irish and British history for ever.

    McGreevy provides more than the anatomy of a political murder; in reconstructing this era of blood, poverty and wartime trauma, he also gives full expression to the terrible forces that WB Yeats once called the “fanatic heart” and the “great hatred”.‘ THE TIMES

    Thoughtful and well-researched . . . an important and valuable addition to the library of the Irish Revolution.‘PROFESSOR DIARMAID FERRITER, University College Dublin

  • Poor

    Poor

    13.95
    Description
    The No. 1 BestsellerBiography of the Year, Irish Book Awards 2023The Last Word Listeners’ Choice Award, Irish Book Awards 2023’One of the best [books] I have read about the complexities of poverty . .

    . one of the most remarkable people you will ever meet’ GuardianLike young girls everywhere Katriona O’Sullivan grew up bright, enthusiastic, curious. But she was also surrounded by abject poverty and chaos, and after she became pregnant and homeless at 15, what followed was five years of barely surviving.

    Yet today Katriona is an award-winning academic whose work explores barriers to education for girls like her. What set Katriona on this unexpected path were the mentors and supporters who truly saw her. The teachers who showed her how to wash in the school toilets or turned up at her door to convince her to sit at least one GCSE.

  • Ireland's Pirate Trail

    Ireland’s Pirate Trail

    14.95

    Bloodthirsty buccaneers and buried treasure, fierce sea battles and cold-blooded murders, Barbary ducats and silver pieces of eight. Des Ekin embarks on a road trip around the entire coast of Ireland, in search of our piratical heritage, uncovering an amazing history of swashbuckling bandits, both Irish-born and imported. Ireland’s Pirate Trail tells stories of freebooters and pirates from every corner of our coast over a thousand years, including famous pirates like Anne Bonny and William Lamport, who set off to ply their trade in the Caribbean.

    Ekin also debunks many myths about our most well-known sea warrior, Granuaile, the ‘Pirate Queen’ of Mayo. Thoroughly researched and beautifully told. Filled with exciting untold stories.

  • The Stolen Village

    The Stolen Village

    14.95

    In June 1631 pirates from Algiers and armed troops of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, led by the notorious pirate captain Morat Rais, stormed ashore at the little harbour village of Baltimore in West Cork. They captured almost all the villagers and bore them away to a life of slavery in North Africa. The prisoners were destined for a variety of fates — some would live out their days chained to the oars as galley slaves, while others would spend long years in the scented seclusion of the harem or within the walls of the Sultan’s palace.

    The old city of Algiers, with its narrow streets, intense heat and lively trade, was a melting pot where the villagers would join slaves and freemen of many nationalities. Only two of them ever saw Ireland again. The Sack of Baltimore was the most devastating invasion ever mounted by Islamist forces on Ireland or England.

    Des Ekin’s exhaustive research illuminates the political intrigues that ensured the captives were left to their fate, and provides a vivid insight into the kind of life that would have awaited the slaves amid the souks and seraglios of old Algiers. The Stolen Village is a fascinating tale of international piracy and culture clash nearly 400 years ago and is the first book to cover this relatively unknown and under-researched incident in Irish history. Shortlisted for the Argosy Irish Nonfiction Book of the Year Award.

  • The I'm Grand Mamual

    The I’m Grand Mamual

    14.95

    PJ Kirby and Kevin Twomey are two mammy’s boys from Cork who are always up for a skit. The I’m Grand Mamual is Kevin and PJ’s hilarious and heart-warming ode to their mammies, Phil and Nuala. Taking a different well-worn saying – such as ‘We haven’t died a winter yet’ and ‘Sure, who’d be looking at you anyway?’ – Kevin and PJ recount wild experiences from their lives – from coming out, holidays and money management to dating, hustling and sustainability – where the phrase has rung true, proving that ‘Mam always knows best.

    With great humour and middling advice, The I’m Grand Mamual is a big-sisterly companion that proudly celebrates embracing yourself and the uniquely Irish mother-child relationship.

  • The Wisdom of Farmers

    The Wisdom of Farmers

    14.95

    ‘There is hard-won wisdom here, and good cheer, and a reminder that the world is much wider, older and more interesting than you’d think’ BILL McKIBBEN’Kind, wise and immensely readable’ TIM FLANNERYA thoughtful, illuminating rumination on the life lessons we can take from those who work the land and the millennia of wisdom they draw upon when they go about their day, ‘making a living by turning light and time into money’. As with his previous bestsellers, John Connell skilfully synthesises philosophy, art, literature and spirituality to bolster his thoughts on such topics as stoicism, the food chain and the role of community, leaving the reader convinced of the importance of connecting with their own inner farmer.

  • Good Mercy

    Good Mercy

    15.00

    Story of the Troubles in Boyle.

  • Diary of a Young Naturalist

    Diary of a Young Naturalist

    15.00

    ‘This diary chronicles the turning of my world, from spring to winter, at home, in the wild, in my head.’

    Evocative, raw and lyrical, this startling debut explores the natural world through the eyes of Dara McAnulty, an autistic teenager coping with the uprooting of home, school, and his mental health, while pursuing his life as a conservationist and environmental activist. Shifting from intense darkness to light, recalling his sensory encounters in the wild – with blackbirds, whooper swans, red kites, hen harriers, frogs, dandelions, Irish hares and more – McAnulty reveals worlds we have neglected to see, in a stunning world of nature writing that is a future classic.

  • Long Island

    Long Island

    15.95
    Description

    ‘Heartbreak, wistfulness, cracking dialogue . . .

    This is Tóibín at his best’ – The Times’A masterful novel full of longing and regret . . .

    Intensely moving and yet full of restraint’ – Douglas Stuart, author of Shuggie BainOPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICKAS HEARD ON BBC RADIO 4Long Island is Colm Tóibín’s masterpiece: an exquisite, exhilarating novel that asks whether it is possible to truly return to the past and renew the great love that seemed gone forever. The sequel to Colm Tóibín’s prize-winning, bestselling novel Brooklyn. A man with an Irish accent knocks on Eilis Fiorello’s door on Long Island and in that moment everything changes.

    Eilis and Tony have built a secure, happy life here since leaving Brooklyn – perhaps a little stifled by the in-laws so close, but twenty years married and with two children looking towards a good future. And yet this stranger will reveal something that will make Eilis question the life she has created. For the first time in years she suddenly feels very far from home and the revelation will see her turn towards Ireland once again.

    Back to her mother. Back to the town and the people she had chosen to leave behind. Did she make the wrong choice marrying Tony all those years ago? Is it too late now to take a different path?

  • Finding Joy

    Finding Joy

    15.95
    Description
    Illustrated by Steve Doogan. AN INSTANT NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER,A PERFECT GIFT FOR ANY OCCASION. A poetry lover, a curator of joy and a wise woman with a deep sense of compassion, Dearbhla Mescal has inspired thousands online to slow down, savour the small moments and rediscover the beauty in everyday life. Now, in her first book, she invites you to join her on a journey of reflection and renewal through a tender and uplifting collection of poems and heartfelt musings.
  • Poor

    Poor

    16.50

    As the middle of five kids growing up in dire poverty, the odds were low on Katriona O’Sullivan making anything of her life. When she became a mother at 15 and ended up homeless, what followed were five years of barely coping.

    This is the extraordinary story – moving, funny, brave, and sometimes startling – of how Katriona turned her life around. How the seeds of self-belief planted by teachers in childhood stayed with her. How she found mentors whose encouragement revived those seeds in adulthood.

    Katriona is now an award-winning lecturer whose work challenges barriers to education. Poor is her stirring argument for the importance of looking out for our kids’ futures. Of giving them hope, practical support and meaningful opportunities.

  • Hagstone

    Hagstone

    16.50

    The sea is steady for now. The land readies itself. What can be done with the woman on the cliff?On a wild and rugged island cut off and isolated to some, artist Nell feels the island is her home.It is the source of inspiration for her art, rooted in landscape, folklore and the feminine. The mysterious Inions, a commune of women who have travelled there from all over the world, consider it a place of refuge and safety, of solace in nature.All the islanders live alongside the strange murmurings that seem to emanate from within the depths of the island, a sound that is almost supernatural – a Summoning as the Inions call it. One day, a letter arrives at Nell’s door from the reclusive Inions who invite Nell into the commune for a commission to produce a magnificent art piece to celebrate their long history.In its creation, Nell will discover things about the community and about herself that will challenge everything she thought she knew.Beautifully written, prescient and eerily haunting, Sinead Gleeson’s debut novel takes in the darker side of human nature and the mysteries of faith and the natural world.