Biography / Memoir

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Poor
€13.95
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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.

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The Choice
€14.50
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THE AWARD-WINNING SUNDAY TIMES AND NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLEREven in hell, hope can flower’I’ll be forever changed by her story’ – Oprah Winfrey’Extraordinary … will stick with you long after you read it’ – Bill Gates’One of those rare and eternal stories you don’t want to end’ – Desmond Tutu’A masterpiece of holocaust literature. Her memoir, like her life, is extraordinary, harrowing and inspiring in equal measure’ – The Times Literary Supplement’I can’t imagine a more important message for modern times.

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Warrior Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries
€14.95
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‘One brilliant woman writing about so many other brilliant women, this is a wonderful treasure chest of women’s lives, full of wit, verve and emotion . . .

Epic, unputdownable, gripping. I loved it’ – Professor Kate Williams”My hope is that this book will inspire as I have been inspired. It’s a love letter to the importance of history and about how, without knowing where we come from – truthfully and entirely – we cannot know who we are.”Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries is a celebration of unheard and under-heard women’s history.

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News from Under a Coat Stand
€15.00
The first six months of 2020 were the strangest of times. An unknown virus was spreading globally that brought social distancing, incredible uncertainty and sadly death. It also brought cocooning, the 2 km travel limit and delicious banana bread. Working from home in Carrick-on-Shannon, County Leitrim, RTÉ Journalist Carole Coleman kept a detailed diary of Covid’s first 100 days. Her lively personal story may remind you of your own town, family and friends – or amaze you about what you missed. While home schooling teenagers, remotely broadcasting Sunday’s This Week radio programme, and chatting with nearly everyone, “News from Under a Coat Stand” provides a poignant, serious, yet often hilarious account of a time Ireland and the world will never forget.

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In Love
€15.50
In January 2020, Amy Bloom travelled with her husband Brian to Switzerland, where he was helped by Dignitas to end his life while Amy sat with him and held his hand. Brian was terminally ill and for the last year of his life Amy had struggled to find a way to support his wish to take control of his death, to not submerge ‘into the darkness of an expiring existence’. Written with piercing insight and wit, In Love is Bloom’s intimate, authentic and startling account of losing Brian, first slowly to the disease of Alzheimer’s, and then on becoming a widow.

It charts the anxiety and pain of the process that led them to Dignitas, while never avoiding the complex ethical problems that are raised by assisted death. A poignant love letter to Bloom’s husband and a passionate outpouring of grief, In Love reaffirms the power and value of human relationships.

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Adventures in Wonderland
€15.95
Irishman Paul Charles is one of the leading music agents on the planet. Over the past 40 years, he has worked with some of the biggest names in music, at different times managing the careers of Van Morrison, Ray Davies of The Kinks, Gerry Rafferty, The Waterboys and Dexys Midnight Runners, and launching Tanita Tikaram – the teenage star whose debut album sold almost 5 million copies – into the world.

In his role with the Asgard agency, he has also promoted shows featuring many of the leading artists in the world, including The Police, U2, Van Morrison, Dire Straits, Carole King, Meatloaf, David Gilmour, BB King, Emmylou Harris and John Lee Hooker.

Paul has also been involved since the early days with Glastonbury Festival, with his artists topping the bill on more than one occasion before he was invited by Glastonbury founder Michael Eavis to take on the daunting – and inspiring – task of booking the Acoustic Stage at the festival every year, a role he has carried out for the past 30 years.

Packed with jaw-dropping stories, including the time when he was almost burned alive along with his precious record collection, and pen pictures of the kind of stars we all want to know more about, Adventures In Wonderland is also one of the most complete insights into the world – and the business – of music that you will ever encounter. It is a must-read for every music fan – and for students of how the world of rock ’n’ roll works alike.

Powerfully honest, often hilarious, frequently touching, and with wonderfully evocative photos, Adventures in Wonderland is a thoroughly joyous trip that will inspire readers to fall in love with music – whether for the first time or, better still, all over again…

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Thin Places
€16.50
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A breathtaking mix of memoir, nature writing and history: this is Kerri ni Dochartaigh’s story of a wild Ireland, an invisible border, an old conflict and the healing power of the natural world’A special, beautiful, many-faceted book’ Amy Liptrot’A remarkable piece of writing . . .

Luminous’ Robert Macfarlane’Eloquent . . .

moving’ Sinead GleesonKerri ni Dochartaigh was born in Derry, on the border of the North and South of Ireland, at the very height of the Troubles. She was brought up on a council estate on the wrong side of town. But for her family, and many others, there was no right side.

One parent was Catholic, the other was Protestant. In the space of one year they were forced out of two homes and when she was eleven a homemade petrol bomb was thrown through her bedroom window. Terror was in the very fabric of the city, and for families like Kerri’s, the ones who fell between the cracks of identity, it seemed there was no escape.

In Thin Places, a mixture of memoir, history and nature writing, Kerri explores how nature kept her sane and helped her heal, how violence and poverty are never more than a stone’s throw from beauty and hope, and how we are, once again, allowing our borders to become hard, and terror to creep back in. Kerri asks us to reclaim our landscape through language and study, and remember that the land we fight over is much more than lines on a map. It will always be ours but, at the same time, it never really was.

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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.

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Manopause
€16.95
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Having just turned 40, Bernard O’Shea found himself hurtling towards a mid-life crisis. His waistline expanded, his flexibility abandoned him, his wardrobe was invaded by elasticated beige trousers and sandals – could this be the male menopause?In his hilarious and often alarmingly honest style, Bernard documents his journey, first fighting the menopause tooth and nail – buying into every fad diet and hair-growth pill, even returning to Mass to find faith – before recruiting the help of a therapist, some experts in mindfulness, and, as always, the support of his long-suffering wife. Can Bernard navigate the manopause to come out the other side with his dignity intact? He’s about to find out …

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Forever a Rock ‘N’ Roll Kid
€16.95
If the past is a foreign country, then Charlie McGettigan is the best of tour guides. His book takes us back to Ballyshannon in the 1950s, avoiding the clichéd golden summers where sweetness and light prevailed. Instead he takes us around the back of the set to show us a ‘warts and all’ view of Irish life in what are laughingly called ‘the good old days,’ where poverty and deprivation were made worse by a dominant clerical presence and an often brutal schooling system that together succeeded in driving many young people away from both religion and education. Charlie pulls no punches but nevertheless manages to avoid being bitter, mixing the hard stories with heart-warming tales of childish fun from the pre-electronic days when you had to make your own. His stories of the hard work and dedication that brought him musical success give a snapshot of the heady days of the folk scene in Ireland in the 1970s and the 1980s, when the country seemed to be full of folk and ballad groups vying for a slice of the action. If ever the old adage of achieving overnight success after thirty years of hard graft applied to anybody, it surely applies to Charlie.

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Untamed
€17.50
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‘This book will shake your brain and make your soul scream. I am so ready for myself after reading this book!’ Adele’Untamed will liberate women – emotionally, spiritually, and physically. It is phenomenal.’ Elizabeth Gilbert, author of City of Girls and Eat Pray LoveWho were you before the world told you who to be? Part inspiration, part memoir, Untamed explores the joy and peace we discover when we stop striving to meet the expectations of the world, and instead dare to listen to and trust in the voice deep inside us.

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Greenlights
€17.50
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From the Academy Award (R)-winning actor, an unconventional memoir filled with raucous stories, outlaw wisdom, and lessons learned the hard way about living with greater satisfaction. I’ve been in this life for fifty years, been trying to work out its riddle for forty-two, and been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for the last thirty-five. Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud.

How to be fair. How to have less stress. How to have fun.

How to hurt people less. How to get hurt less. How to be a good man.

How to have meaning in life. How to be more me. Recently, I worked up the courage to sit down with those diaries.

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Saltwater in the Blood
€17.50
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This is an incredibly inspiring exploration of the sea’s role in the wellness of people and the planet, beautifully written by Easkey Britton – surfer, scientist and social activist. She offers a powerful female perspective on the sea and surfing, explaining what it’s like to be a woman in a man’s world and how she promoted the sport to women in Iran, surfing while wearing a hijab. She speaks of the undiscussed taboo around entering the water while menstruating – and of how she has come to celebrate her own bodily cycles.

She has developed her own approach to surfing, which instead of seeking to dominate the waves, works in tune with the natural cycles of her body, the moon and the seasons. In a society that rewards busyness, she believes that understanding the influence of cycles becomes even more important – and we all have them, men and women. For Easkey, the sea is a source of mental and physical wellbeing.

She explores the mental toughness needed in big-wave surfing, and presents surfing as an embodied mindfulness practice in which we can find flow and connect with the movement of the waves. She stresses the need to recognize the ocean as our most powerful ally when addressing our greatest global challenge: the climate crisis. Above all, Easkey’s relationship to the sea has taught her about the need to meet life and evolve with it, rather than seeking to control it.

By such wisdom our planet might just survive and thrive.

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All Down Darkness Wide
€17.50
A luminous and haunting memoir from the prize-winning poet – a story of love, heartbreak and coming of age, and a fearless exploration of queer identity and trauma. When Sean meets Elias, the two fall headlong into a love story. But as Elias struggles with severe depression, the couple comes face-to-face with crisis.

Wrestling with this, Sean Hewitt delves deep into his own history, enlisting the ghosts of queer figures and poets before him. From a nineteenth-century cemetery in Liverpool to the pine forests of Gothenburg, Hewitt plumbs the darkness in search of solace and hope. All Down Darkness Wide is an unflinching meditation on the burden of living in a world that too often sets happiness and queer life at odds, and a tender portrayal of what it’s like to be caught in the undertow of a loved one’s suffering.

By turns devastating and soaring, it is a mesmerising story of heartache and renewal, and a work of rare and transcendent beauty.

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This Is My Sea
€17.50
Over the course of seven difficult years Miriam Mulcahy lost her mother, father and sister, each grief threatening to drown her. But instead of going under she discovered the lessons of the sea, letting the water teach her how to get through anything in life: one breath builds on another, another stroke, another kick and you will get home. THIS IS MY SEA takes our greatest fear, death, and wraps it up in language so fine and beautiful that the reader is carried along and comforted by how completely lost Miriam was and how she found solace in all the things that sustained her: books, music, art, friends, love, swimming, and of course the sea.

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Madhouse at the End of the Earth
€17.95
The harrowing, survival story of an early polar expedition that went terribly wrong, with the ship frozen in ice and the crew trapped inside for the entire sunless, Antarctic winter

August 1897: The Belgica set sail, eager to become the first scientific expedition to reach the white wilderness of the South Pole. But the ship soon became stuck fast in the ice of the Bellinghausen sea, condemning the ship’s crew to overwintering in Antarctica and months of endless polar night. In the darkness, plagued by a mysterious illness, their minds ravaged by the sound of dozens of rats teeming in the hold, they descended into madness.

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