Literary Fiction

Showing 33–48 of 48 results

Shuggie Bain
€12.50
Winner of the Booker Prize 2020 Shortlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction 2020 A BBC Radio 2 Between the Covers 2021 Book Choice ‘We were bowled over by this first novel, which creates an amazingly intimate, compassionate, gripping portrait of addiction, courage and love.’ The judges of the Booker Prize ‘Douglas Stuart has written a first novel of rare and lasting beauty.’ – Observer It is 1981. Glasgow is dying and good families must grift to survive. Agnes Bain has always expected more from life.

She dreams of greater things: a house with its own front door and a life bought and paid for outright (like her perfect, but false, teeth). But Agnes is abandoned by her philandering husband, and soon she and her three children find themselves trapped in a decimated mining town. As she descends deeper into drink, the children try their best to save her, yet one by one they must abandon her to save themselves.

It is her son Shuggie who holds out hope the longest. Shuggie is different. Fastidious and fussy, he shares his mother’s sense of snobbish propriety.

The miners’ children pick on him and adults condemn him as no’ right. But Shuggie believes that if he tries his hardest, he can be normal like the other boys and help his mother escape this hopeless place. Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain lays bare the ruthlessness of poverty, the limits of love, and the hollowness of pride.

A counterpart to the privileged Thatcher-era London of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, it also recalls the work of Edouard Louis, Frank McCourt, and Hanya Yanagihara, a blistering debut by a brilliant writer with a powerful and important story to tell.

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SOUND AND THE FURY
€12.50
A complex, intense American novel of family from the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, with an introduction by Richard Hughes. Ever since the first furore was created on its publication in 1929, The Sound and the Fury has been considered one of the key novels of this century. Depicting the gradual disintegration of the Compson family through four fractured narratives, the novel explores intense, passionate family relationships where there is no love, only self-centredness. At its heart, this is a novel about lovelessness – ‘Only an idiot has no grief; only a fool would forget it. What else is there in this world sharp enough to stick to your guts?’

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The Autumn of the Patriarch
€12.50
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, explores the loneliness of power in Autumn of the Patriarch.

‘Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside.’

As the citizens of an unnamed Caribbean nation creep through dusty corridors in search of their tyrannical leader, they cannot comprehend that the frail and withered man lying dead on the floor can be the self-styled General of the Universe. Their arrogant, manically violent leader, known for serving up traitors to dinner guests and drowning young children at sea, can surely not die the humiliating death of a mere mortal?

Tracing the demands of a man whose egocentric excesses mask the loneliness of isolation and whose lies have become so ingrained that they are indistinguishable from truth, Marquez has created a fantastical portrait of despotism that rings with an air of reality.

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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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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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The Many
€8.95
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016

Timothy Buchannan buys an abandoned house on the edge of an isolated village on the coast, sight unseen. When he sees the state of it he questions the wisdom of his move, but starts to renovate the house for his wife, Lauren to join him there. When the villagers see smoke rising from the chimney of the neglected house they are disturbed and intrigued by the presence of the incomer, intrigue that begins to verge on obsession.

And the longer Timothy stays, the more deeply he becomes entangled in the unsettling experience of life in the small village. Ethan, a fisherman, is particularly perturbed by Timothy’s arrival, but accedes to Timothy’s request to take him out to sea. They set out along the polluted coastline, hauling in weird fish from the contaminated sea, catches that are bought in whole and removed from the village.

Timothy starts to ask questions about the previous resident of his house, Perran, questions to which he receives only oblique answers and increasing hostility. As Timothy forges on despite the villagers’ animosity and the code of silence around Perran, he starts to question what has brought him to this place and is forced to confront a painful truth. The Many is an unsettling tale that explores the impact of loss and the devastation that hits when the foundations on which we rely are swept away.

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The Only Story
€10.95
BARNES, JULIAN

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THE PARIS WIFE
€9.95
Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a shy twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness when she meets Ernest Hemingway and is captivated by his energy, intensity and burning ambition to write. After a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for France. But glamorous Jazz Age Paris, full of artists and writers, fuelled by alcohol and gossip, is no place for family life and fidelity.

Ernest and Hadley’s marriage begins to founder, and the birth of a beloved son serves only to drive them further apart. Then, at last, Ernest’s ferocious literary endeavours begin to bring him recognition – not least from a woman intent on making him her own.

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THE SONG OF ACHILLES
€11.95
WINNER OF THE ORANGE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION

Greece in the age of heroes. Patroclus, an awkward young prince, has been exiled to the court of King Peleus and his perfect son Achilles. Despite their differences, Achilles befriends the shamed prince, and as they grow into young men skilled in the arts of war and medicine, their bond blossoms into something deeper – despite the displeasure of Achilles’s mother Thetis, a cruel sea goddess.

But when word comes that Helen of Sparta has been kidnapped, Achilles must go to war in distant Troy and fulfil his destiny. Torn between love and fear for his friend, Patroclus goes with him, little knowing that the years that follow will test everything they hold dear.

‘An exciting, sexy, violent Superman version of The Iliad‘ GUARDIAN

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The Tailor of Panama
€17.50
Charmer, fabulist and tailor to Panama’s rich and powerful, Harry Pendel loves to tell stories. But when the British spy Andrew Osnard – a man of large appetites, for women, information and above all money – walks into his shop, Harry’s fantastical inventions take on a life of their own. Soon he finds himself out of his depth in an international game he can never hope to win.

Le Carre’s savage satire on the espionage trade is set in a corrupt universe without heroes or honour, where the innocent are collateral damage and treachery plays out as tragic farce.

‘A tour de force in which almost every convention of the classic spy novel is violated‘ The New York Times Book Review

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The Thing Around Your Neck
€10.95
ADICHIE, CHIMAMANDA NGOZI

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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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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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UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING
€12.50
A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon; a man torn between his love for her and his womanising. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals; while her other lover stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance and weight – and we feel ‘the unbearable lightness of being’.

A masterpiece by one of the world’s greatest writers, Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being encompasses passion and philosophy, infidelity and ideas, the Prague Spring and modern America, political acts and private desires, comedy and tragedy – in fact, all of human existence.

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Who They Was
€14.95
Description

Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2020’A literary rendering of the Top Boy generation… I cannot conjure another work which captures this culture in such depth – or with such brutal honesty – as only lived experience can tell ‘ Graeme Armstrong, author of The Young Team’An astonishingly powerful book’ Cathy Rentzenbrink, author of The Last Act of LoveThis life is like being in an ocean. Some people keep swimming towards the bottom.

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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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Liber