Non Fiction

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The Irish Diaspora
€12.00
Description

The Irish have always been a travelling people. In the centuries after the fall of Rome, Irish missionaries carried the word of Christianity throughout Europe, while soldiers and mariners from across the land ventured overseas in all directions. Since 1800 an estimated 10 million people have left the Irish shores and today more than 80 million people worldwide claim Irish descent.

The advent of the British Empire ignited a slow but extraordinary exodus from Ireland. The pioneering explorers of the Tudor Age were soon overtaken in number by religious refugees, the ‘Wild Geese’ who opted to live outside of the Protestant state and to take their chances in the Spanish or French empires, or in America. The Irish played a pivotal role in the foundation of the United States of America, just as they would in the Civil War that followed eighty-five years later.

The lives of Irish emigrants wove in and out of the major events of global history, including the Abbe Edgeworth, confessor to King Louis XVI at his execution during the French Revolution; Margaretta Eagar, governess to the daughters of Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia; and William Lamport, who travelled from County Wexford to Central America, and became Don Guillen, a martyr for Mexican independence. Turtle Bunbury explores the lives of those men and women, great and otherwise, whose journeys – whether driven by faith, a desire for riches and adventure, or purely for survival – have left their mark on the world.

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Thin Places
€16.50
Description

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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The Gospel According to Blindboy
€12.95
Description
Sunday Business Post Book of the Year Blindboy Boatclub is one half of the Rubberbandits, Ireland’s foremost satirist and now the talented author of a collection of brilliant short stories and visual art. Published to critical acclaim, his first collection is powered by big themes and even bigger ideas. There are stories about a van fuelled by Cork people’s accents, Tipperary’s first ISIS recruit, a sexually aggressive banshee and a fridge dragged heroically through the streets of Limerick.

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For and Against A United Ireland
€19.95
Description

The prospect of Irish unification is now stronger than at any point since partition in 1921. Voters on both sides of the Irish border may soon have to confront for themselves what the answer to a referendum question would mean – for themselves, for their neighbours, and for their society. Journalists Fintan O’Toole and Sam McBride examine the strongest arguments for and against a united Ireland.

What do the words ‘united Ireland’ even mean? Would it be better for Northern Ireland? Would it improve lives in the Republic of Ireland? And could it be brought about without bloodshed?O’Toole and McBride each argue the case for and against unity, questioning received wisdom and bringing fresh thinking to one of Ireland’s most intractable questions.

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Crooks
€18.95
Description

THE #1 IRISH TIMES BESTSELLERFor almost forty years, Paul Williams has chronicled the life and crimes of some of Ireland’s most notorious godfathers, killers and thieves. In Crooks he brings his readers for a ride-along, taking us behind the scenes of his most notorious scoops, describing the run-ins he’s had with unsavoury, dangerous criminals and the high price of his line of work. From pursuing the General to death threats from PJ ‘The Psycho’ Judge, exposing the Westies and tracking the Kinahan cartel, Paul’s extraordinary career doubles as an eyewitness account of the evolution of organized crime in Ireland.

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This Boy’s Heart
€22.95
Description

John Creedon is a renowned storyteller. Following on from the sensational success of An Irish Folklore Treasury, here he seeks to capture the folklore of his own childhood. This Boy’s Heart is set in a city-centre household bursting with humanity, with a cast of a dozen children and another dozen adults, including beloved aunts, an American writer, an African doctor and a Scottish bookie.

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The Kidnapping
€18.95
November 1983. As top supermarket executive Don Tidey sets out on the school run, he is snatched from his car and driven away at speed. The IRA, using kidnapping to fund its armed campaign, has its latest victim.

What follows is a massive manhunt and, twenty-three days later, a chaotic rescue in a Leitrim wood. No one emerges unscathed – not the man at the centre of the drama, not the local community, not the gardai, not the Irish state. And especially not the families of the soldier and the young garda killed as Tidey is freed.

Powerful, intimate and searching, The Kidnapping is a brilliantly reported account of an iconic episode. At its heart are remarkable interviews with Don Tidey, talking about these events in detail for the first time, and with the families of Private Kelly and Garda Sheehan who explain the devastating fall-out for them. The book also raises thought-provoking questions about the legacy of these events for today’s Ireland.

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Madhouse
€19.95
I grew up in a psychiatric experiment crossed with an alcoholic experiment . . . a place run by two people who were extraordinarily drunk and guarded by a potentially vicious dog with a brain tumour.

PJ Gallagher spent much of his childhood knocking back Lucozade with the local alcoholics in his parents’ northside pub. But the chaos that reigned for his first ten years was nothing compared to what happened when – having lost the pub – his mum took in six psychiatric patients from the local hospital to give them ‘care in the community’.

Worst. Idea. Ever.

Madhouse is PJ’s riotous life story. Covering everything from dogs, motorbikes and the art of small talk, to the lessons of mental breakdown and finally figuring out love, this is PJ unbound. Most surprising – to PJ more than anyone – is the prospect of becoming a dad in his late forties, when he always thought of ‘family’ as a trap.

Madhouse is the funny, insightful and moving story of someone just trying to keep his head above water – and how he is making sense of it all at last!

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Dirty Linen
€22.95
Martin Doyle, Books Editor of The Irish Times, offers a personal, intimate history of the Troubles seen through the microcosm of a single rural parish, his own, part of both the Linen Triangle – heartland of the North’s defining industry – and the Murder Triangle – the Badlands devastated by paramilitary violence. He lifts the veil of silence drawn over the horrors of the past, recording in heartrending detail the terrible toll the conflict took – more than twenty violent deaths in a few square miles – and the long trail of trauma it has left behind.

Neighbours and classmates who lost loved ones in the conflict, survivors maimed in bomb attacks and victims of sectarianism, both Catholic and Protestant, entrust Doyle with their stories. Writing with a literary sensibility, he skillfully shows how the once dominant local linen industry serves as a metaphor for communal division but also for the solidarity that transcended the sectarian divide. To those who might ask why you would want to reopen old wounds, the answer might be that some wounds have never been allowed to heal.

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Limitless
€19.95
The sea has always been a part of Nuala Moore’s life: her earliest memory is of jumping off her father’s fishing boat in Dingle Harbour and swimming back to shore. Since then, she’s swum in some of the coldest, most remote and dangerous waters in the world, from the Bering Strait to the Drake Passage. After years of marathon swimming, Nuala struggled to balance sacrifice and achievement.

Her work-life balance, coupled with caring for her father, forced a change in her pathway. She turned to ice swimming. For Nuala, these extreme situations offered freedom and a chance to find her true north.

Nuala believes that everyone is capable of greatness, whatever shape that might take. Limitless is her breathtaking memoir, detailing what goes through her mind when she’s in the water and how, when she returns home, she processes the fallout of pushing herself to the brink.

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Disobedient Bodies
€9.50
An unmissable essay from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Don’t Touch My Hair and What White People Can Do Next.

For too long, beauty has been entangled in the forces of patriarchy and capitalism: objectification, shame, control, competition and consumerism. We need to find a way to do beauty differently.

This radical, deeply personal and empowering essay points to ways we can all embrace our unruly beauty and enjoy our magnificent, disobedient bodies. It accompanies The Cult of Beauty, a major exhibition at Wellcome Collection, opening in October 2023.

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Emperor of Rome
€34.00
A NEW WAY OF SEEING THE ROMAN EMPIRE

What was it really like to rule and be ruled in the Ancient Roman world? In her international best-seller SPQR, Mary Beard told the thousand-year story of ancient Rome.

Now, she shines her spotlight on the emperors who ruled the Roman empire, from Julius Caesar (assassinated 44 BCE) to Alexander Severus (assassinated 235 CE). Emperor of Rome is not your usual chronological account of Roman rulers, one after another: the mad Caligula, the monster Nero, the philosopher Marcus Aurelius. Beard asks bigger questions: What power did emperors actually have? Was the Roman palace really so bloodstained? Emperor of Rome goes directly to the heart of Roman (and our own) fantasies about what it was to be Roman, offering an account of Roman history as it has never been presented before.

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The Book You Want Everyone You Love to Read
€19.95
Life is all about relationships and the quality of those connections, whether that’s with family, partners, friends, colleagues or most importantly yourself. If you can get those relationships on a functional and even keel, then the other tricky stuff that life throws your way becomes easier to manage.

In this warm, practical and witty book, No.1 Sunday Times bestselling psychotherapist Philippa Perry shows you how to approach life’s big problems.

How do you find and keep love? What can you do to manage conflict better? How can you get unstuck and cope with change and loss? What does it mean to you to be content? Are other people just annoying or are you the problem?

With a healthy dose of sanity, Philippa Perry’s compassionate advice could help you become a happier, wiser person.

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Oh Miriam!
€19.95
Join us on another unforgettable adventure through the extraordinary life and strong opinions of Miriam Margolyes.

‘My new book is called OH MIRIAM! – something that has been said to me a lot over the years, often in tones of strong disapproval. It contains lots more revelations and stories and discoveries and I can’t wait to share it with you all!’

From being escorted off the Today programme (for saying what we were all thinking) to declaring her love to Vanessa Redgrave; from Tales of the Unexpected to Graham Norton’s sofa, she is the UK’s most loved and most outspoken national treasure. Oh Miriam! takes you inside both her head and her heart.

Buckle up for the most irrepressible, hilarious and moving read of 2023

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Burning Questions
€15.95
From cultural icon Margaret Atwood comes a brilliant collection of essays — funny, erudite, endlessly curious, uncannily prescient — which seek answers to Burning Questions such as: Why do people everywhere, in all cultures, tell stories?How can we live on our planet?What do zombies have to do with authoritarianism?In Burning Questions Atwood aims her prodigious intellect and impish humour at our world, and reports back to us on what she finds. The roller-coaster period covered in the collection brought an end to the end of history, a financial crash, the rise of Trump and a pandemic. From debt to tech, the climate crisis to freedom; from when to dispense advice to the young (answer: only when asked) to how to define granola, we have no better questioner of the many and varied mysteries of our human universe.

INCLUDES NEW ESSAYS FOR PAPERBACK

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All Down Darkness Wide
€13.50
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 a mesmerising story of heartache and renewal, and a fearless exploration of a world that too often sets happiness and queer life at odds.

WINNER OF THE ROONEY PRIZE FOR IRISH LITERATURE 2022

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