Books

  • The Gilligan Tapes

    The Gilligan Tapes

    17.95

    ‘I DON’T BELIEVE IN GOD, BUT I KNOW I’M GOING TO HELL.’

    In this remarkable book – the first of its kind – journalist Jason O’Toole distils hours of sensational face-to-face, no-holds-barred interviews with the feared criminal John Gilligan into a fast-paced and jaw-dropping account of the Irish gangland scene.

    Starting out as a petty thief in Dublin, Gilligan rapidly rose to the status of crime lord, mixing with serious criminals such as Martin ‘The General’ Cahill, Christy ‘The Dapper Don’ Kinahan, Patrick ‘Dutchy’ Holland and John ‘The Coach’ Traynor. He was deeply involved with money laundering, miraculously survived an assassination attempt, and it is said he has millions stashed away at a secret location. O’Toole demands answers to all the hard questions; some of Gilligan’s responses will make readers shiver.

    Gilligan knew that laying all his cards on the table could mean signing his own death warrant. But he has done it here. And with a cast of all the country’s deadliest underworld figures, this exposé is nothing short of explosive.

  • The Late Night Writers Club

    The Late Night Writers Club

    22.95

    A Graphic Novel

    A talented but annoying Debut Author, suffering from writer’s block and mysterious headaches, ghosted by his girlfriend and on his last chance with his bartender job, takes refuge in the National Library of Ireland, hoping for some last-minute inspiration within those hallowed walls.

    Tortured by literary inadequacy and disappointed love, can he somehow absorb the famous modesty of Yeats, the wit of Edgeworth, the charm of Binchy, the wisdom of Heaney? But a weird twist of fate or perhaps a guiding hand reveals all is not what it seems in the library after dark, and The Author soon discovers: be careful what you wish for. In rich and abundant illustrations, Annie West tells a rowdy story of artistic struggle, ego and unexpected kindness. You will never look at the Irish Literary Canon in the same way again.

  • The Book of Fire

    The Book of Fire

    16.50

    This morning, I met the man who started the fire. He did something terrible, but then, so have I. I left him.

    I left him and now he may be dead. Once upon a time there was a beautiful village that held a million stories of love and loss and peace and war, and it was swallowed up by a fire that blazed up to the sky. The fire ran all the way down to the sea where it met with its reflection.

    A family from two nations, England and Greece, live a simple life on a tiny Greek island: Irini, Tasso and their daughter, lovely, sweet Chara, whose name means joy. Their life goes up in flames in a single day when one man starts a fire out of greed and indifference. Many are killed, homes are destroyed, and the island’s natural beauty wiped out.

    In the wake of the fire, Chara bears deep scars across her back and arms. Tasso is frozen in trauma, devastated that he wasn’t there when his family most needed him. And Irini is crippled by guilt at her part in the fate of the man who started the fire.

    But this family has survived, and slowly green shoots of hope and renewal will grow from the smouldering ruins of devastation. Once again, Christy Lefteri has crafted a novel which is intimate and epic, sweeping and delicate. The Book of Fire explores not only the damage wrought by human folly, but also – and ultimately – our powers of redemption and renewal.

  • Ravensong

    Ravensong

    17.95

    Set in the dreamy backwoods of Oregon, Ravensong is a queer, paranormal romance of burning passion and pack loyalty, and is the sequel to Wolfsong.

    Gordo Livingstone never forgot the lessons carved into his skin. Hardened by the betrayal of a pack who left him behind, he sought solace in the garage in his tiny mountain town, vowing never again to involve himself in the affairs of wolves.

    It should have been enough.

    And it was, until the wolves came back, and with them, Mark Bennett. In the end, they faced the beast together as a pack . . . and won.

    Now, a year later, Gordo has found himself once again the witch of the Bennett pack. Green Creek has settled after the death of Richard Collins, and Gordo constantly struggles to ignore Mark and the song that howls between them.

    But time is running out. Something is coming. And this time, it’s crawling from within.

    Some bonds, no matter how strong, were made to be broken.

    Ravensong is the second book in TJ Klune’s beloved Green Creek series. Continue the journey with Heartsong.

  • Study for Obedience

    Study for Obedience

    15.50

    NAMED AS ONE OF GRANTA MAGAZINE’S BEST OF YOUNG BRITISH NOVELISTS 2023

    A woman moves from the place of her birth to a remote northern country to be housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has just left him. The youngest child of many siblings – more than she cares to remember – from earliest childhood she has attended to their every desire, smoothed away the slightest discomfort with perfect obedience, with the highest degree of devotion. The country, it transpires, is the country of their family’s ancestors, an obscure though reviled people.

    Soon after she arrives, a series of unfortunate events occurs – collective bovine hysteria; the demise of a ewe and her nearly-born lamb; a local dog’s phantom pregnancy; the containment of domestic fowl; a potato blight. She notices that the local suspicion about incomers in general seems to be directed particularly in her case. What is clear is that she is being accused of wrongdoing, but in a language she cannot understand and so cannot address.

    And however diligently and silently she toils in service of the community, still she feels their hostility growing, pressing at the edges of her brother’s property. Inside the house, although she tends to her brother and his home with the utmost care and attention, he too begins to fall ill …

  • Tom Lake

    Tom Lake

    16.95

    This is a story about Peter Duke who went on to be a famous actor. This is a story about falling in love with Peter Duke who wasn t famous at all. It s about falling so wildly in love with him the way one will at twenty-four that it felt like jumping off a roof at midnight. There was no way to foresee the mess it would come to in the end.

    It is spring and Lara s three grown daughters have returned to the family orchard. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the one story they ve always longed to hear of the film star with whom she shared a stage, and a romance, years before.

    Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents lead before their children are born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart.

  • The Wager

    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.

  • All the Broken Places

    All the Broken Places

    12.50

    She doesn’t talk about her escape from Germany seventy years ago or the dark post-war years in France with her mother. Most of all, she doesn’t talk about her father, the commandant of one of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps. But when a young family moves into the apartment below her, Gretel can’t help but befriend their little boy, Henry, though his presence brings back painful memories.

    One night, she witnesses a violent argument between his parents, which threatens to disturb her hard-won peace. For the second time in her life, Gretel is given the chance to save a young boy. To do so would allay her guilt, grief and remorse, but it will also force her to reveal her true identity.

  • Old Istanbul and Other Essays

    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.

  • A Bit of a Writer Brendan Behan's Collected Short Prose

    A Bit of a Writer Brendan Behan’s Collected Short Prose

    25.00

    Brendan Behan wrote over one hundred articles for Irish newspapers between 1951 and 1956 as he rose to international fame, with most of them written in a weekly column in the Irish Press. The articles reveal a serious writer capable of great comic set pieces and amusing yarns as well as thoughtful reflections on cultural and historical issues. They reflect his passion for working-class Dublin life and the history and folklore of the city, as well as his travels in Ireland and Europe.

    This edition gathers all the articles and essays that Behan published in newspapers from 1951 to his death in 1964. Selections of Behan’s articles have been published since his death (Hold Your Hour and Have Another, 1965; After the Wake, 1981; The Dubbalin Man, 1997). However, there has been no complete edition of Behan’s prose, and no edition has provided a detailed biographical and literary introduction, explanatory notes and suggestions for further reading.

    This volume is intended for publication during the centenary celebrations of Behan’s birth in 2023, with his birthday being 9 February.

  • Happy-Go-Lucky

    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

  • Walfrid

    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.

  • How To Build A Boat

    How To Build A Boat

    17.50

    Jamie O’Neill loves the colour red. He also loves tall trees, patterns, rain that comes with wind, the curvature of many objects, books with dust jackets, cats, rivers and Edgar Allan Poe. At age 13 there are two things he especially wants in life: to build a Perpetual Motion Machine, and to connect with his mother Noelle, who died when he was born.

    In his mind these things are intimately linked. And at his new school, where all else is disorientating and overwhelming, he finds two people who might just be able to help him.

    How to Build a Boat is the story of how one boy and his mission transforms the lives of his teachers, Tess and Tadhg, and brings together a community. Written with tenderness and verve, it’s about love, family and connection, the power of imagination, and how our greatest adventures never happen alone.

  • Close to Home

    Close to Home

    16.95

    Luminous and devastating, a portrait of modern masculinity as shaped by class, by trauma, and by silence, but also by the courage to love and to surviveSean’s brother Anthony is a hard man. When they were kids their ma did her best to keep him out of trouble but you can’t say anything to Anto. Sean was supposed to be different.

    He was supposed to leave and never come back. But Sean does come back. Arriving home after university, he finds Anthony’s drinking is worse than ever.

    Meanwhile the jobs in Belfast have vanished, Sean’s degree isn’t worth the paper it’s written on and no one will give him the time of day. One night he loses control and assaults a stranger at a party, and everything is tipped into chaos. Close to Home witnesses the aftermath of that night, as Sean attempts to make sense of who he has become, and to reckon with the relationships that have shaped him, for better and worse.

    Drawing from his own experiences, Michael Magee examines the forces which keep young working class men in harm’s way, in a debut novel which shines with intelligence and humanity on every page. Close to Home is an extraordinary work of fiction about deciding what kind of a man you want to be and finding your place in the scarred city you call home.

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    Young Enough to Hear

    12.00

    COLREAVY, SEAMUS

  • My Fourth Time, We Drowned

    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.