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Demon Copperhead
€12.50
Demon’s story begins with his traumatic birth to a single mother in a single-wide trailer, looking ‘like a little blue prizefighter.’ For the life ahead of him he would need all of that fighting spirit, along with buckets of charm, a quick wit, and some unexpected talents, legal and otherwise. In the southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, poverty isn’t an idea, it’s as natural as the grass grows. For a generation growing up in this world, at the heart of the modern opioid crisis, addiction isn’t an abstraction, it’s neighbours, parents, and friends.

‘Family’ could mean love, or reluctant foster care. For Demon, born on the wrong side of luck, the affection and safety he craves is as remote as the ocean he dreams of seeing one day. The wonder is in how far he’s willing to travel to try and get there.

Suffused with truth, anger and compassion, Demon Copperhead is an epic tale of love, loss and everything in between.

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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.

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The Moon Gate
€17.50
1939: On the eve of war, young English heiress Grace Grey travels from London to the wilderness of Tasmania.

Coaxed out of her shell by the attentions of her Irish neighbour, Daniel – Grace finally learns to live. But when Australian forces are called to the frontline, and Daniel with them, he leaves behind a devastating secret which will forever bind them together.

1975: Artist Willow Hawkins, and her new husband, Ben, can’t believe their luck when an anonymous benefactor leaves them a house on the remote Tasmanian coast. Confused and delighted, they set out to unmask Towerhurst’s previous owner – unwittingly altering the course of their lives.

2004: Libby Andrews has always been sheltered from the truth behind her father Ben’s death.

When she travels to London and discovers a faded photograph, a long-buried memory is unlocked, and she begins to follow an investigation that Ben could never complete. But will she realise that some secrets are best left buried . . .?

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Limelight
€17.95
Frankie has a love-hate relationship with the spotlight.

She secretly craves attention, but she is ashamed of that craving. And after a lifetime of comparison to her perfect sister Bean, she has never felt more invisible. She only ever feels seen when she uploads risque photos to her small community of online fans.

She creates a new her: confident, sexy and utterly unrecognisable from the real Frankie.

Then the worst happens. Bean is diagnosed with cancer. While Frankie wants to fill the freezer with home cooked food, her mother decides she knows better and somehow launches a nationwide cancer fundraiser, with Frankie as the supportive-sister-spokesmodel.

Inevitability, her account is found. Now everyone has their eyes on Frankie.

With her family no longer speaking to her, Frankie flounders in her newfound notoriety. Feminists and misogynists rage at her online, while she attracts hundreds of new subscribers.

Whether they’re demanding apologies or expecting an empowering call to arms, everyone wants Frankie to explain herself. But how can she explain what she barely understands?

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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.

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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’.

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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

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The Satsuma Complex
€12.50
‘My name is Gary. I’m a thirty-year-old legal assistant with a firm of solicitors in London. To describe me as anonymous would be unfair but to notice me other than in passing would be a rarity.

I did make a good connection with a girl, but that blew up in my face and smacked my arse with a fish slice.’

Gary Thorn goes for a pint with a work acquaintance called Brendan. When Brendan leaves early, Gary meets a girl in the pub.

He doesn’t catch her name, but falls for her anyway. When she suddenly disappears without saying goodbye, all Gary has to remember her by is the book she was reading: The Satsuma Complex. But when Brendan goes missing, Gary needs to track down the girl he now calls Satsuma to get some answers.

And so begins Gary’s quest, through the estates and pie shops of South London, to finally bring some love and excitement into his unremarkable life.

A page-turning story with a cast of unforgettable characters, The Satsuma Complex is the brilliantly funny smash hit first novel by bestselling author and comedian Bob Mortimer.

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Next In Line
€9.95
London, 1988. Royal fever sweeps the nation as Britain falls in love with the ‘people’s princess’.

Which means for Scotland Yard, the focus is on the elite Royalty Protection Command, and its commanding officer. Entrusted with protecting the most famous family on earth, they quite simply have to be the best. A weak link could spell disaster.

Detective Chief Inspector William Warwick and his Scotland Yard squad are sent in to investigate the team. Maverick ex-undercover operative Ross Hogan is charged with a very sensitive – and unique – responsibility. But it soon becomes clear the problems in Royalty Protection are just the beginning.

A renegade organization has the security of the country – and the Crown – in its sights. The only question is which target is next in line…

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The Black Dog
€12.50
A life-affirming debut novel from one of Britain’s most-loved comedians, Kevin Bridges – exploring dysfunctional friendships, family, and how to face your problems head on. Declan Dolan has always wanted to be a writer, turning the ideas that spiral in his head into stories on the page. He longs to emulate his hometown hero, renowned writer and actor, James Cavani.

Though their lives couldn’t be more different, they have a lot more in common than they think. With his pet labrador Hector and his best friend-turned-mentor Doof Doof by his side, Declan sets out to escape his world of binge-drinking, supermarket shelf-stacking and small-time gangsters. Meanwhile Cavani finds himself drawn back into this world that he thought he had already escaped.

Could it be that fate has a way of bringing two people together when they need it the most?

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Ancestry
€12.50
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL FICTION

Almost two hundred years ago, Abraham, an illiterate urchin, scavenges on a Suffolk beach and dreams of running away to sea … Naomi, a seventeen-year-old seamstress, imagines a new life in the big city … George, a private soldier of the 50th Regiment of Food, marries his Irish bride, Annie, in the cathedral in Manchester and together they face married life under arms.

Now these people exist only in the bare bones of registers and census lists but they were once real enough. Simon Mawer puts flesh on our ancestors’ bones to bring them to life and give them voice. There is birth and death; there is love, both open and legal but also hidden and illicit.

Yet the thread that connects these disparate figures is something that they cannot have known – the unbreakable bond of family.

‘Utterly absorbing, cleverly constructed and beautifully written’ The Times

‘Moving and exhilarating’ Spectator

‘Evokes the messiness and fragility of everyday life in the nineteenth century’ Daily Mail

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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

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The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece
€18.95
A wildly ambitious story of the making of a colossal, star-studded, multimillion-dollar superhero action film, and the humble comic book that inspired it all.

Spanning 80 years of a changing America and culminating in the opening of the film, we meet a colourful cast of characters including a troubled soldier returning from war, a young boy with an artistic gift, an inspired and eccentric director, a pompous film star on the rise, a tireless production assistant and countless film crew members that together create Hollywood magic.

Funny, touching, and wonderfully thought-provoking, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece offers an insider’s take on the momentous efforts it takes to make a film. At once a reflection on America’s past and present, on the world of show business and the real world we all live in.

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Falling Animals
€15.50
On an isolated beach set against a lonely, windswept coastline, a pale figure sits serenely against a sand dune staring out to sea.

His hands are folded neatly in his lap, his ankles are crossed and there is a faint smile on his otherwise lifeless face. Months later, after a fruitless investigation, the nameless stranger is buried in an unmarked grave. But the mystery of his life and death lingers on, drawing the nearby villagers into its wake.

From strandings to shipwrecks, it is not the first time that strangeness has washed up on their shores. Told through a chorus of voices, Falling Animals follows the crosshatching threads of lives both true and imagined, real and surreal, past and present. Slowly, over great time and distance, the story of one man, alone on a beach, begins to unravel.

Elegiac and atmospheric, dark and disquieting, Sheila Armstrong s debut novel marks her arrival as one of the most uniquely gifted writers at work in literary fiction today.

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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.

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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?

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Liber