Literary Fiction

Showing 1–16 of 49 resultsSorted by popularity

Demon Copperhead
€12.50
Demon’s story begins with his traumatic birth to a single mother in a single-wide trailer, looking ‘like a little blue prizefighter.’ For the life ahead of him he would need all of that fighting spirit, along with buckets of charm, a quick wit, and some unexpected talents, legal and otherwise. In the southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, poverty isn’t an idea, it’s as natural as the grass grows. For a generation growing up in this world, at the heart of the modern opioid crisis, addiction isn’t an abstraction, it’s neighbours, parents, and friends.

‘Family’ could mean love, or reluctant foster care. For Demon, born on the wrong side of luck, the affection and safety he craves is as remote as the ocean he dreams of seeing one day. The wonder is in how far he’s willing to travel to try and get there.

Suffused with truth, anger and compassion, Demon Copperhead is an epic tale of love, loss and everything in between.

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Americanah
€12.50
A delicious, important novel’ The Times ‘Alert, alive and gripping’ Independent ‘Some novels tell a great story and others make you change the way you look at the world. Americanah does both’ Guardian As teenagers in Lagos, Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love. Their Nigeria is under military dictatorship, and people are fleeing the country if they can.

The self-assured Ifemelu departs for America. There she suffers defeats and triumphs, finds and loses relationships, all the while feeling the weight of something she never thought of back home: race. Obinze had hoped to join her, but post-9/11 America will not let him in, and he plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London.

Thirteen years later, Obinze is a wealthy man in a newly democratic Nigeria, while Ifemelu has achieved success as a blogger. But after so long apart and so many changes, will they find the courage to meet again, face to face? Fearless, gripping, spanning three continents and numerous lives, the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning ‘Americanah’ is a richly told story of love and expectation set in today’s globalized world.

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A Gentleman in Moscow
€12.50
On 21 June 1922, Count Alexander Rostov – recipient of the Order of Saint Andrew, member of the Jockey Club, Master of the Hunt – is escorted out of the Kremlin, across Red Square and through the elegant revolving doors of the Hotel Metropol. Deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the Count has been sentenced to house arrest indefinitely. But instead of his usual suite, he must now live in an attic room while Russia undergoes decades of tumultuous upheaval.

Can a life without luxury be the richest of all?

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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 …

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The Librarianist
€16.95
Bob Comet is a retired librarian passing his solitary days surrounded by books in a mint-colored house in Portland, Oregon. One morning on his daily walk he encounters a confused elderly woman lost in a market and returns her to the senior center that is her home. Hoping to fill the void he’s known since retiring, he begins volunteering at the center.

Here, as a community of strange peers gathers around Bob, and following a happenstance brush with a painful complication from his past, the events of his life and the details of his character are revealed. Behind Bob Comet’s straight man facade is the story of an unhappy child’s runaway adventure during the last days of the Second World War, of true love won and stolen away, of the purpose and pride found in the librarian’s vocation, and the pleasures of a life lived to the side of the masses. Comet’s experiences are imbued with melancholy but also a bright, sustained comedy; he has a talent for locating bizarre and outsized players to welcome onto the stage of his life.

With his inimitable verve, skewed humor, and compassion for the outcast, Patrick deWitt has written a wide-ranging and ambitious document of the introvert’s condition. The Librarianist celebrates the extraordinary in the so-called ordinary life, and depicts beautifully the turbulence that sometimes exists beneath a surface of serenity.

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All My Puny Sorrows
€12.50
Shortlisted for the Folio Prize 2015; Shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize 2015; Sunday Times Top Choice Summer Read; A SUNDAY TIMES TOP 100 NOVEL OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY.

Elf and Yoli are two smart, loving sisters. Elf is a world-renowned pianist, glamorous, wealthy, happily married: she wants to die. Yoli is divorced, broke, sleeping with the wrong men: she desperately wants to keep her older sister alive.

When Elf’s latest suicide attempt leaves her hospitalised weeks before her highly anticipated world tour, Yoli is forced to confront the impossible question of whether it is better to let a loved one go.

‘The novel she has written – so exquisitely that you’ll want to savour every word – reads as if it has been wrenched from her heart.‘ Christina Patterson, Sunday Times

‘[Toews] has produced a masterly book of such precise dignity. It is, also against all the odds, at times a desperately humorous novel.‘ Daily Mail

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Women Talking
€12.50
Between 2005 and 2009, in a remote Mennonite colony, over one hundred girls and women were raped by what many thought were ghosts or demons. Their accounts were dismissed as ‘wild female imagination’. Women Talking is an imagined response to these real events.

When the women learn the truth, they meet secretly to discuss how to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm. But they have just two days to decide, before the rapists are bailed out and brought home.

‘Don’t miss this one! This amazing, sad, shocking, but touching novel, based on a real-life event, could be right out of The Handmaid’s Tale‘ – Margaret Atwood, Twitter

‘Brave and thoughtful.‘ Observer

‘Wickedly funny and fearlessly honest.‘ New Yorker

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The Bee Sting
€12.00
Description

WINNER OF THE NERO BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION 2023WINNER OF AN POST IRISH BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2023SHORTLISTED FOR THE WRITERS’ PRIZE FOR FICTION 2024SHORTLISTED FOR THE KERRY GROUP NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2024ONE OF SARAH JESSICA PARKER’S BEST BOOKS OF 2023Book of the Year 2023 according to New York Times, New Yorker, The Sunday Times, The Economist, Observer, Guardian, Washington Post, Lit Hub, TIME magazine, Irish Times, The Oldie, Daily Mail, i Paper, Independent, The Standard, The Times, Kirkus, Daily Express, City A.M. ‘A tragicomic triumph. You won’t read a sadder, truer, funnier novel this year’ GuardianThe Barnes family are in trouble.

Until recently they ran the biggest business in town, now they’re teetering on the brink of bankruptcy – and that’s just the start of their problems. Dickie and Imelda’s marriage is hanging by a thread; straight-A student Cass is careening off the rails; PJ is hopelessly in debt to the school bully. Meanwhile the ghosts of old mistakes are rising out of the past to meet them, but everyone’s too wrapped up in the present to see the danger looming .

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Oh William!
€12.50
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2022

THE TOP 10 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

The Pulitzer Prize-winning, Booker-longlisted, bestselling author returns to her beloved heroine Lucy Barton in a luminous novel about love, loss, and the family secrets that can erupt and bewilder us at any point in life. Lucy Barton is a successful writer living in New York, navigating the second half of her life as a recent widow and parent to two adult daughters. A surprise encounter leads her to reconnect with William, her first husband – and long-time, on-again-off-again friend and confidante. Recalling their college years, the birth of their daughters, the painful dissolution of their marriage, and the lives they built with other people, Strout weaves a portrait, stunning in its subtlety, of a tender, complex, decades-long partnership.

Oh William! captures the joy and sorrow of watching children grow up and start families of their own; of discovering family secrets, late in life, that alter everything we think we know about those closest to us; and the way people live and love, against all odds. At the heart of this story is the unforgettable, indomitable voice of Lucy Barton, who once again offers a profound, lasting reflection on the mystery of existence. ‘This is the way of life,’ Lucy says. ‘The many things we do not know until it is too late.’

‘A superbly gifted storyteller and a craftswoman in a league of her own’ Hilary Mantel

‘A terrific writer’ Zadie Smith

‘She gets better with each book’ Maggie O’Farrell

‘One of America’s finest writers’ Sunday Times

‘This is meticulously observed writing, full of probing psychological insight. Lucy Barton is one of literature’s immortal characters – brittle, damaged, unravelling, vulnerable and, most of all, ordinary – like us all’ Booker Prize Judges

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Blue Ticket
€8.95
Calla knows how the lottery works. Everyone does. On the day of your first bleed, you report to the station to learn what kind of woman you will be.

A white ticket grants you children. A blue ticket grants you freedom. You are relieved of the terrible burden of choice.

And, once you’ve taken your ticket, there is no going back.

But what if the life you’re given is the wrong one?

Blue Ticket is a devastating enquiry into free will and the fraught space of motherhood. Bold and chilling, it pushes beneath the skin of female identity and patriarchal violence, to the point where human longing meets our animal bodies.

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ANIMAL FARM
€10.50
‘All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others.’ Mr Jones of Manor Farm is so lazy and drunken that one day he forgets to feed his livestock. The ensuing rebellion under the leadership of the pigs, Napoleon and Snowball, leads to the animals taking over the farm.

Vowing to eliminate the terrible inequities of the farmyard, the renamed Animal Farm is organised to benefit all who walk on four legs. But as time passes, the ideals of the rebellion are corrupted, then forgotten. And something new and unexpected emerges.

First published in 1945, Animal Farm – the history of a revolution that went wrong – is George Orwell’s brilliant satire on the corrupting influence of power.

‘Remains our great satire of the darker face of modern history‘ Malcolm Bradbury

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD
€9.95
Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, this work explores with humour the irrationality of adult attitudes to race and class in the Deep South of the thirties.

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Where Are the Kings
€17.95
Description

Tender, moving, full of warmth, crackling with humour and the love of family, the exquisite new novel from the author of HEART BE AT PEACE, winner of the Orwell Prize for Fiction and the Irish Book of the Year‘Beautiful, hilarious and completely gripping’ RACHEL JOYCE, author of The Handmade God’No one gets inside the heart like Donal Ryan’ KIT DE WAAL, author of The Best of Everything‘Donal Ryan conjures up characters so solid, so complete and authentic, it immediately feels as though you have known them for your entire life’ JOANNA CANNON, author of An Unlikely Visitor***Something terrible has happened to Jack but no one seems to want to talk about it. His uncles can tell him about everything from quantum physics to how to hunt for deer, but they can’t seem to tell him anything about their own sister or why Jack doesn’t feel sad for her in the way he should, or why Grandad tries to shoot Jack’s dad when he gets out of the hospital. Still, there’s work to be done in the oily wonderland of his uncles’ garage; there’s his beautiful aunt Rose to hypnotise him and his loving grandparents to console him; then there’s JJ, who wants to fight him one day and save him the next.

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Said the Dead
€16.95
Description

From the author of A Ghost in the Throat, an unforgettable book – both history and ghost story – that will leave you gasping by its final page. ‘There’s magic in this one’ Kevin Barry’This book will be read for decades to come’ Anne Enright’Astonishing’ Yiyun Li’Nobody currently writing is pulling off sorcery like this’ RTÉThe more she learned, the more certain she became: this other world was alive and true and trembling, and very close to her own. Now she had a secretIn the city of Cork, a derelict Victorian mental hospital is being converted into modern apartments.

One passerby has always flinched as she passes the place. Had she lived in another time, she too might have found herself held within those walls. Now, she notices a sign: FOR SALE.

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The Things We Never Say
€19.95
Artie Dam is a man with a secret. He spends his days teaching history to high schoolers, expanding their young minds, correcting their casual cruelties, and lending a kind word to those who need it most.

He goes to holiday parties with his wife of three decades, makes small talk with neighbours, and, on weekends, takes his sailboat out on the beautiful Massachusetts Bay. He is, by all appearances, present and alive. But inside, Artie is plagued by feelings of isolation.

He looks out at a world gone mad—at himself and the people around him—and turns a question over and over in his mind: how is it that we know so little about one another, even those closest to us?And then, one day, Artie learns that life has been keeping a secret from him, one that threatens to upend his entire world. Once he learns it, he is forced to chart a new course, to reconsider the relationships he holds most dear—and to make peace with the mysteries at the heart of our existence. With exquisite prose and profound insight, Elizabeth Strout captures the way grief reverberates through decades, the comfort found in deep friendships and the freedom that comes when we break free of our secrets.

The Things We Never Say is a stunning new novel from one of our most acclaimed observers of the human heart. ***PRAISE FOR ELIZABETH STROUT:’A terrific writer’ ZADIE SMITH’A superbly gifted storyteller’ HILARY MANTEL’Elizabeth Strout is one of my very favourite writers’ ANN PATCHETT’Strout’s ability to reveal wonder in unrecorded lives continues to astonish’ TELEGRAPH’She gets better with each book’ MAGGIE O’FARRELL’A beautiful read’ OPRAH WINFREY’Strout is, as ever, wonderfully attentive life’s escapable cruelties and woes’ SUNDAY TIMES

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Hamnet
€12.95
The no. 1 bestseller that inspired the major film starring Jessie Buckley and Paul MescalWINNER: BEST PICTURE (DRAMA) AND BEST ACTRESS AT THE GOLDEN GLOBESWINNER: OUTSTANDING BRITISH FILM AND BEST ACTRESS AT THE BAFTASNOMINATED FOR EIGHT ACADEMY AWARDS, INCLUDING BEST SCREENPLAY AND BEST PICTURE’A thing of shimmering wonder’ David Mitchell ?A LOVE THAT DRAWS THEM TOGETHER. A LOSS THAT THREATENS TO TEAR THEM APART.

The untold love story that inspired Shakespeare’s greatest masterpiece. On a summer’s day in 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon takes to her bed with a sudden fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches everywhere for help.

Why is nobody at home?Their mother, Agnes, is over a mile away, in the garden where she grows medicinal herbs. Their father is working in London. Neither parent knows that Hamnet will not survive the week.

Hamnet tells the powerful story of Agnes and Will, and of the son whose life has been all but forgotten, but who inspired one of the greatest plays ever written. 🌟Fall in love with HAMNET this year 🌟’HAMNET is a feast for the senses”One of my favourite books of the year. Simply gorgeous”Words fail me…

this story had me feeling everything”I read and reread passages throughout this exceptional novel’

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Liber