Books

  • 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.

  • The Mess We're In

    The Mess We’re In

    17.50

    It’s the turn of the millennium and, landing in London with nothing but her CD collection and demo tape, Orla Quinn moves into a squalid Kilburn house with her best mate and a band called Shiva.

    Orla wants to make music, but juggling two jobs and partying every night isn’t helping.

    Back in Ireland her parents’ marriage has crumbled, she’s not speaking to her father, and her mother and sister are drinking too much.

    While Orla’s own dreams seem to be going nowhere, Shiva are on the brink of something big. But as the hype around the band intensifies, so does the hedonism, and relationships in the house are growing strained.

    This is the story of a young woman thrashing through life, trying to find home in a strange new place. It’s also a story about music: how it can break you down and build you back up again, and how to find your rhythm when all you hear is noise.

  • The Ferryman

    The Ferryman

    19.50

    The islands of Prospera lie in a vast ocean: in splendid isolation from the rest of humanity, or whatever remains of it. . .

    Citizens of the main island enjoy privileged lives, attended to by the support staff who live on a cramped neighbouring island, where whispers begin to grow into cries for revolution.

    Meanwhile, life for Prosperans is perfection – and when it’s not, their bodies are sent to the mysterious third island: a facility named The Nursery, to be rebooted and restart life afresh.

    Proctor Bennett is a Ferryman, who shepherds the soon-to-be retired into the unknown.

    He never questioned his work until the day he is delivered a cryptic message:

    “The world is not the world…”

    These simple words unravel something that he has secretly suspected. They seep into strange dreams – of the stars and the sea – and the unshakeable feeling that someone is trying to tell him something important.

    Something greater than anyone could possibly imagine, which could change the fate of humanity itself…

  • Service

    Service

    17.95

    When Hannah learns that famed chef Daniel Costello is facing accusations of sexual assault, she’s thrown back to the summer she spent waitressing at his high-end Dublin restaurant – the plush splendour of the dining rooms, the wild parties after service, the sizzling tension of the kitchens.

    But Hannah also remembers how the attention from Daniel soon morphed from kindness into something darker. Now the restaurant is shuttered and Daniel is faced with the reality of a courtroom. His wife Julie is hiding from paparazzi lenses behind the bedroom curtains.

    Surrounded by the wreckage of the past, Daniel, Julie and Hannah are all forced to reconsider what happened at the restaurant. Their three different voices reveal a story of power and complicity, of the lies that we tell and the courage that it takes to face the truth.

  • Soldier Sailor

    Soldier Sailor

    15.50

    KILROY, CLAIRE

  • Broken Light

    Broken Light

    16.50

    Bernie Moon has given her life to other people: her husband, her son, her friends (who are these days, mostly online). At nineteen she was full of dreams and ambitions; now almost fifty, and going through the menopause, she’s fading, fast. Heartbroken and hormonal, she often feels like she’s losing her mind.

    But when a young woman is murdered in a local park, it sparks a series of childhood memories in Bernie and with them, a talent that has lain dormant most of her adult life.

    She promised herself she’d never think of it again.

    When she was a teenager, it almost destroyed her. But now she’s older, could it be the power she’s been missing?

  • Donegal has a rich heritage of myths and legends which is uniquely captured in this collection of traditional tales from the county. Discover the trails where Balor of the Evil Eye once roamed, the footprint left by St Colmcille when he leapt to avoid a demon and the places where ordinary people once encountered devils, ghosts, and fairies. In a vivid journey through Donegal’s varied landscape, from its spectacular rugged coast line to the majestic mountains of Errigal and Muckish, and on to the rich farmland of the east, local storyteller Joe Brennan takes the reader to places where legend and landscape are inseparably linked.

  • The Tide Is Coming

    The Tide Is Coming

    50.00

    The Tide is Coming – a book of Coney Island in Sligo Bay by Maura Gilligan –
    is a beautiful limited-edition publication containing prose, poetry, interviews, photographs
    and artwork.
    As the title of this book suggests, the rhythm of the tides has, for centuries, dictated the
    rhythm of life on Coney Island. During his lifetime, Islander John McGowan called out the
    warning “the tide is coming” countless times, ensuring that visitors would cross the causeway
    safely before channels at either side closed the strand passage and made an island of his
    shores.
    This little island is said to have given its name to Coney Island in New York! Its ancient
    name, Inismulclohy, can be found in maps, records and annals.

    Contents
    Insightful poetry and prose reflect the author’s thoughts as she moves across the Island in
    space and time.
    Author-transcribed interviews with Island elder John McGowan form an integral part of this
    book, illuminating eight decades of life in a place inhabited by John’s ancestors since 1789.
    There are echoes here of life on other offshore Irish islands, now uninhabited.
    Photographer James Fraher’s haunting black and white images, together with Catherine
    Fanning’s remarkable paintings, prints and line drawings, add visual depth and magic.

    Special Features
    The book itself is a work of art; a striking hardback cover collage is enhanced by timeless
    quarter binding, head and tail bands, marker ribbon and rich-coloured endpapers.  Sumptuous
    Munken paper provides the perfect backdrop for superb illustrations and exceptional writing.
    Folded within the pages of this book is a surprise – an A3 loose-leaf ‘Map of Coney Island in
    Sligo Bay’, which can be framed. Created from an old and fragile line-drawn original, the
    current version of this map illustrates locations on and around the Island, some of which still
    carry their original Irish names.
    The Tide is Coming is a wonderful history of an Irish island and a perfect gift.

  • Small Mercies

    Small Mercies

    17.50

    The acclaimed New York Times bestselling writer returns with a masterpiece to rival Mystic River – an all-consuming tale of revenge, family love, festering hate, and insidious power, set against one of the most tumultuous episodes in Boston’s history.

    In the summer of 1974 a heatwave blankets Boston and Mary Pat Fennessey is trying to stay one step ahead of the bill collectors. Mary Pat has lived her entire life in the housing projects of ‘Southie’, the Irish American enclave that stubbornly adheres to old tradition and stands proudly apart.

    One night Mary Pat’s teenage daughter Jules stays out late and doesn’t come home. That same evening, a young Black man is found dead, struck by a subway train under mysterious circumstances. The two events seem unconnected.

    But Mary Pat, propelled by a desperate search for her missing daughter, begins turning over stones best left untouched – asking questions that bother Marty Butler, chieftain of the Irish mob, and the men who work for him, men who don’t take kindly to any threat to their business. Set against the hot, tumultuous months when the city’s desegregation of its public schools exploded in violence, Small Mercies is a superb thriller, a brutal depiction of criminality and power, and an unflinching portrait of the dark heart of American racism. It is a mesmerising and wrenching work that only Dennis Lehane could write.

  • 1950s Dublin, in a lock-up garage in the city, the body of a young woman is discovered, an apparent suicide. But pathologist Dr Quirke and Detective Inspector Strafford soon suspect foul play.

    The victims sister, a newspaper reporter from London, returns to Dublin to join the two men in their quest to uncover the truth. But, as they explore her links to a wealthy German family in County Wicklow, and to investigative work she may have been doing in Israel, they are confronted with an ever-deepening mystery.

    With relations between the two men increasingly strained, and their investigation taking them back to the final days of the Second World War, can they join the pieces of a hidden puzzle?

  • In A Thousand Different Ways

    In A Thousand Different Ways

    15.00

    Finding your way is never a simple journey.

    Alice sees the worst in people. She also sees the best. She sees a thousand different emotions and knows exactly what everyone around her is feeling. Every. Single. Day. But it’s the dark thoughts.The sadness. The rage. These are the things she can’t get out of her head. The things that overwhelm her. Where will the journey to find herself begin?

  • 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.

  • One For My Enemy

    One For My Enemy

    16.50

    From Olivie Blake, the bestselling author of The Atlas Six, One For My Enemy is a captivating fantasy story of ambition, sacrifice and the enduring power of family legacies. This hardback edition includes illustrated endpapers from artist Lasq.Draws plus brand-new interior illustrations from Little Chmura. In New York City, two rival witch families fight for the upper hand.

    The Antonova sisters are beautiful, cunning and ruthless, and their mother – known only as Baba Yaga – is the elusive supplier of premium intoxicants. Their adversaries, the influential Fedorov brothers, serve their crime boss father. Named Koschei the Deathless, his enterprise dominates the shadows of magical Manhattan.

    For twelve years, the families have maintained a fraught stalemate. Then everything is thrown into disarray. Bad blood carries them to the brink of disaster, even as fate draws together a brother and sister from either side.

    Yet the siblings still struggle for power, and internal conflicts could destroy each family from within. That is, if the enmity between empires doesn’t destroy both sides first.

  • The Last Days Of Joy

    The Last Days Of Joy

    16.95

    Meet the Tobin Family…

    Joy, the complicated, troubled mother She’s spent her life running from her past while trying to raise her children as best she can. Conor, the high-achieving eldest child A high-profile media figure and CEO, he’s walking a fine line between self-promotion and self-detonation. Frances, the ‘perfect’ middle child Now a wife and mother, she’s about to make a mistake that could destroy her marriage.

    Youngest daughter, Sinead, the acclaimed writer Wrestling with writer’s block, she resorts to desperate measures to deliver her next bestselling book to her publishers. When Joy’s children receive the news that she has only days to live, they rush to her side, bringing with them all of the dysfunction and hurt they have been carrying since their childhoods. Each of them is at a crossroads in their lives – but there’s one more secret about their mother they need to learn.

    Will they finally be able to forgive their mother and, in doing so, face their futures together?

     

  • Forever Home

    Forever Home

    12.50

    Carol is a divorced teacher living in a small town in Ireland, her only son now grown.

    A second chance at love brings her unexpected connection and belonging. The new relationship sparks local speculation: what does a woman like her see in a man like that? What happened to his wife who abandoned them all those years ago? But the gossip only serves to bring the couple closer. When Declan becomes ill, things start to fall apart.

    His children are untrusting and cruel, and Carol is forced to leave their beloved home with its worn oak floors and elegant features and move back in with her parents. Carol’s mother is determined to get to the bottom of things, she won’t see her daughter suffer in this way. It seems there are secrets in Declan’s past, strange rumours that were never confronted and suddenly the house they shared takes on a more sinister significance.

    In his tense and darkly comic new novel Norton casts a light on the relationship between mothers and daughters, and truth and self-preservation with unnerving effect.

  • Juno Loves Legs

    Juno Loves Legs

    15.95

    She’s loved him since their first encounter at school in Dublin, where she fought the playground bullies for him.

    He feels brave with her, she feels safe with him, and together they feel invincible, even if the world has other ideas. The two find their way from the backstreets and city’s pubs to its underground parties and squats, where, on the verge of adulthood, they find a breathing space to begin their real lives. Only Legs’s might be taking him somewhere Juno can’t follow.

    Set during the political and social unrest of the 1980s, as families struggled to survive and their children struggled to be free, this beautiful, vivid novel of childhood friendship is about being young, being hurt, being seen and, most of all, being loved. ‘A heartbreaker, and absolutely unforgettable’ DONAL RYAN, bestselling author of The Queen of Dirt Island’This will break your heart in the very best way and leave you laughing in spite of yourself. A backstreet epic.