Non Fiction

Showing 81–96 of 163 resultsSorted by latest

The Spanish Armada
€12.50
A dramatic blow-by-blow account of the defeat of the Spanish Armada by the English fleet – a tale of daring and disaster on the high seas by one of our best narrative historians. After the accession of Elizabeth I in 1558, Protestant England was beset by the hostile Catholic powers of Europe – not least Spain. In October 1585 King Philip II of Spain declared his intention to destroy Protestant England and began preparing invasion plans, leading to an intense intelligence war between the two countries, culminating in the dramatic sea battles of 1588.

Robert Hutchinson’s tautly written book is the first to examine this battle for intelligence, and uses everything from contemporary eye-witness accounts to papers held by the national archives in Spain and the UK to recount the dramatic battle that raged up the English Channel. Contrary to popular theory, the Armada was not defeated by superior English forces – in fact, Elizabeth I’s parsimony meant that her ships had no munitions left by the time the Armada had fought its way up to the south coast of England. In reality it was a combination of inclement weather and bad luck that landed the killer blow on the Spanish forces, and of the 125 Spanish ships that set sail against England, only 60 limped home – the rest sunk or wrecked with barely a shot fired.

Add to basket
10-Year Record of BTS
€38.95
THE FIRST EVER OFFICIAL BOOK – Published in celebration of BTS’s 10th Anniversary, stories that go beyond what you already know about BTS, including unreleased photos, QR codes of videos, and all album information. After taking their first step into the world on June 13, 2013, BTS will celebrate the 10th anniversary of their debut in June 2023. They have risen to the peak as an iconic global artist and during this meaningful time, they look back on their footsteps in the first official book.

In doing so, BTS nurtures the power to build brighter days and they choose to take another step on a road that no one has gone before. BTS shares personal, behind-the-scenes stories of their journey so far through interviews and more than three years of in-depth coverage by Myeongseok Kang, who has written about K-pop and other Korean pop culture in various media. Presented chronologically in seven chapters from before the debut of BTS to the present, their vivid voices and opinions harmonize to tell a sincere, lively, and deep story.

In individual interviews that have been conducted without a camera or makeup, they illuminate their musical journey from multiple angles and discuss its significance. In addition, portrait photos that show BTS as individuals and artists open the book, and throughout there are concept photos, tracklists of all previous albums, and over 330 QR codes. As digital artists, BTS has been communicating with the world through the internet and this book allows readers to immediately access trailers, music videos, and more online to have a rich understanding of all the key moments in BTS history.

Complete with a timeline of all major milestones, BEYOND THE STORY is a remarkable archive-truly everything about BTS in one volume.

Add to basket
The Wager
€17.50
1 BESTSELLER From the international bestselling author of KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON and THE LOST CITY OF Z, a mesmerising story of shipwreck, mutiny and murder, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth. On 28th January 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell.

They were survivors of His Majesty’s ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon, the Wager was wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The crew, marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing 2,500 miles of storm-wracked seas.

They were greeted as heroes. Then, six months later, another, even more decrepit, craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways and they had a very different story to tell.

Add to basket
Old Istanbul and Other Essays
€22.00
This is the first book of essays by a major new Irish non-fiction writer from the West of Ireland, comparable to the celebrated Kilkenny essayist Hubert Butler first published by The Lilliput Press and subsequently widely acclaimed. McCarthy’s writing is no less distinguished than Butler’s.

Gerard McCarthy writes of the extraordinarily subtle mix of his essays: “Perhaps the Philosophers who had the most enduring influence on me were the contrary figures of Nietzsche and Marcus Aurelius. The reading of each was an antidote to the other, but I was drawn to both by an instinctive affinity. They were augmented subsequently by the gargantuan figure of Michel de Montaigne. My interest has continued to be in the region where Philosophy merges into Literature, with a preference for a language of metaphor rather than of abstract reasoning.”

McCarthy continues: “These eight essays were written over the course of more than a decade. The fact that they have all been published in the one place, by the good offices of Irish Pages, has allowed me see the continuity between them, and to hope that they might be seen by the reader to form a unity.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gerard McCarthy (1949-2022) was born and reared in Dublin, and spent most of his adult life in Sligo, where he worked as social worker. He studied Philosophy at University College Dublin, with an early interest in Nietzsche and Marcus Aurelius, augmented subsequently by Michel de Montaigne. His first published essays – now collected here – have all appeared in issues of Irish Pages: A Journal of Contemporary Writing. He divided his time between his Sligo residence, an old schoolhouse on Collanmore Island in Clew Bay, and various travels to the Mediterranean and other peripheries of Europe. Old Istanbul & Other Essays was his first book.

Add to basket
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…

Add to basket
I Will Be Good
€18.50
Meet Peig McManus, an unforgettable Dublin character whose story will make you laugh and cry. Her memoir of a 1940s’ childhood is recounted with candour and wit, as she describes her early years in the last of the city’s tenements, under the shadow of the Second World War. Even in the midst of sorrow, as the ravages of poverty and tuberculosis prevailed, there was always singing and laughter.

Peig recalls happy family gatherings in their tenement rooms before their way of life was shattered when the slums were cleared, making way for the migration of inner-city families to Dublin’s new suburbs. Peig learned early about class distinction, chastity and shame, and fought against social prejudice to become one of Ireland’s foremost campaigners for educational reform. But a quiet sorrow lay at the heart of her life, one which could not be hidden forever.

Now, in her eighties, Peig shares her story: an inspiring journey through the trials and triumphs of a remarkableIrish woman who refused to do what she was told.

Add to basket
Foreign Bodies
€19.95
Cities and countries engulfed by panic and death, desperate for vaccines but fearful of what inoculation may bring. This is what the world has just gone through with Covid-19. But as Simon Schama shows in his epic history of vulnerable humanity caught between the terror of contagion and the ingenuity of science, it has happened before.

Characteristically, with Schama the message is delivered through gripping, page-turning stories set in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: smallpox strikes London; cholera hits Paris; plague comes to India. Threading through the scenes of terror, suffering and hope – in hospitals and prisons, palaces and slums – are an unforgettable cast of characters: a philosopher-playwright burning up with smallpox in a country chateau; a vaccinating doctor paying house calls in Halifax; a woman doctor in south India driving her inoculator-carriage through the stricken streets as dead monkeys drop from the trees. But we are also in the labs when great, life-saving breakthroughs happen, in Paris, Hong Kong and Mumbai.

At the heart of it all, an unsung hero: Waldemar Haffkine. A gun-toting Jewish student in Odesa turned microbiologist at the Pasteur Institute, hailed in England as ‘the saviour of mankind’ for vaccinating millions against cholera and bubonic plague in British India while being cold-shouldered by the medical establishment of the Raj. Creator of the world’s first mass production line of vaccines in Mumbai, he is tragically brought down in an act of shocking injustice.

Foreign Bodies crosses borders between east and west, Asia and Europe, the worlds of rich and poor, politics and science. Its thrilling story carries with it the credo of its author on the interconnectedness of humanity and nature; of the powerful and the people. Ultimately, Schama says, as we face the challenges of our times together, ‘there are no foreigners, only familiars’.

Add to basket
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

Add to basket
Happy-Go-Lucky
€13.50
In Happy-Go-Lucky, David Sedaris once again captures what is most unexpected, hilarious, and poignant about recent upheavals, personal and public, and expresses in precise language both the misanthropy and desire for connection that drive us all. If we must live in interesting times, there is no one better to chronicle them than the incomparable David Sedaris.

‘Unquestionably the king of comic writing’ HADLEY FREEMAN, Guardian

‘Although Sedaris is famous for being funny, he does pain heartbreakingly well’ MELISSA KATSOULIS, The Times

‘His wickedly hilarious riffs are pyrotechnics in words’ PETER CONRAD, Observer

Add to basket
Walfrid
€23.95
Andrew Kerins [Brother Walfrid] [1840 – 1915] was one of
the most significant Irish immigrants to Scotland. He
was an outstanding individual in relation to Catholic
education and charity in Glasgow and a major
contributor to the emergence of organised sport in
Scotland in the late nineteenth century.
He was but one individual, amongst countless thousands
of victims, who survived the catastrophe of An Gorta Mor
in Ireland, only to be forced to leave behind family,
community and homeland in the hope of finding a
better life overseas. Over one million others perished
owing to the prevalence of starvation and disease during
Ireland’s darkest period. Kerins left for Glasgow as a
fifteen-year-old boy and the spectre of hunger,
accompanied by a concern for the spiritual and physical
well-being of others, are motifs which endured
throughout his long and impactful life.

Add to basket
The Boy Who Started Celtic
€12.00
THIS BOOK is the story of a boy, a calf and one of
the biggest football clubs in the world.
It is also a story of how one person can change
many people’s lives.
All great journeys begin with a single step. As a
boy, Brother Walfrid did not know he was starting
a great journey when he sold a calf at County
Sligo’s Ballymote Fair and took the boat to
Scotland.
Every day, people are starting great journeys and
they don’t even know it. They are just trying, like
Walfrid, to make people’s lives better by helping
others who are not as fortunate as them. Walfrid
helped people and started one of the world’s most
well-known football clubs.
Perhaps readers of Brother Walfrid’s story may
start a great journey of their own one day?

Add to basket
My Fourth Time, We Drowned
€13.50
The Western world has turned its back on refugees, fuelling one of the most devastating human rights disasters in history.

In August 2018, Sally Hayden received a Facebook message. ‘Hi sister Sally, we need your help,’ it read. ‘We are under bad condition in Libya prison. If you have time, I will tell you all the story.’ More messages followed from more refugees. They told stories of enslavement and trafficking, torture and murder, tuberculosis and sexual abuse.

And they revealed something else: that they were all incarcerated as a direct result of European policy. From there began a staggering investigation into the migrant crisis across North Africa. This book follows the shocking experiences of refugees seeking sanctuary, but it also surveys the bigger picture: the negligence of NGOs and corruption within the United Nations.

The economics of the twenty-first-century slave trade and the EU’s bankrolling of Libyan militias. The trials of people smugglers, the frustrations of aid workers, the loopholes refugees seek out and the role of social media in crowdfunding ransoms. Who was accountable for the abuse? Where were the people finding solutions? Why wasn’t it being widely reported? At its heart, this is a book about people who have made unimaginable choices, risking everything to survive in a system that wants them to be silent and disappear.

Add to basket
Spare
€26.95
It was one of the most searing images of the twentieth century: two young boys, two princes, walking behind their mother’s coffin as the world watched in sorrow – and horror. As Diana, Princess of Wales, was laid to rest, billions wondered what the princes must be thinking and feeling – and how their lives would play out from that point on. For Harry, this is that story at last.

With its raw, unflinching honesty, Spare is a landmark publication full of insight, revelation, self-examination, and hard-won wisdom about the eternal power of love over grief. Prince Harry wishes to support British charities with donations from his proceeds from Spare. The Duke of Sussex has donated $1,500,000 to Sentebale, an organisation he founded with Prince Seeiso in their mothers’ legacies, which supports vulnerable children and young people in Lesotho and Botswana affected by HIV/AIDS.

Prince Harry will also donate to the non-profit organisation WellChild in the amount of GBP300,000. WellChild, which he has been Royal patron of for fifteen years, makes it possible for children and young people with complex health needs to be cared for at home instead of hospital, wherever possible.

Add to basket
Mr. Attention To Detail
€12.95
KELLY, JOE

Add to basket
Warrior Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries
€14.95
Description

‘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.

Add to basket
Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing
€19.95
‘Hi, my name is Matthew, although you may know me by another name.

My friends call me Matty. And I should be dead.’

So begins the riveting story of acclaimed actor Matthew Perry, taking us along on his journey from childhood ambition to fame to addiction and recovery in the aftermath of a life-threatening health scare. Before the frequent hospital visits and stints in rehab, there was five-year-old Matthew, who travelled from Montreal to Los Angeles, shuffling between his separated parents; fourteen-year-old Matthew, who was a nationally ranked tennis star in Canada; twenty-four-year-old Matthew, who nabbed a coveted role as a lead cast member on the talked-about pilot then called Friends Like Us.

. . and so much more.

In an extraordinary story that only he could tell – and in the heartfelt, hilarious, and warmly familiar way only he could tell it – Matthew Perry lays bare the fractured family that raised him (and also left him to his own devices), the desire for recognition that drove him to fame, and the void inside him that could not be filled even by his greatest dreams coming true.

But he also details the peace he’s found in sobriety and how he feels about the ubiquity of Friends, sharing stories about his castmates and other stars he met along the way. Frank, self-aware, and with his trademark humour, Perry vividly depicts his lifelong battle with addiction and what fuelled it despite seemingly having it all.

Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing is an unforgettable memoir that is both intimate and eye-opening – as well as a hand extended to anyone struggling with sobriety. Unflinchingly honest, moving, and uproariously funny, this is the book fans have been waiting for.

Add to basket

Liber