Books

  • The Danger Gang

    The Danger Gang

    13.50

    The electrifying new adventure from bestselling author of The Christmasaurus and The Creakers, Tom Fletcher!

    Franky can’t wait to move to his new town – although he wishes he didn’t have to leave his best friend Dani behind. But everything changes after the storm, when strange green lightning and powerful thunder crash down on the town. From that night on, the kids who live on Franky’s street start to change.

    One by one, they become a little odd. A little unusual. A little…magical.
    Franky’s always wanted to be part of an amazing gang – just like his hero, super-spy Zack Danger! And soon, he realises that there’s real danger in store for himself and his new friends. And so the Danger Gang is born…

  • Constellations

    Constellations

    13.50
    Description
    *Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2020**Winner of non-fiction book of the year at the Irish Book Awards*’Utterly magnificent. Raw, thought-provoking and galvanising; this is a book every woman should read.’ -Eimear McBride, author of A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing. I have come to think of all the metal in my body as artificial stars, glistening beneath the skin, a constellation of old and new metal.
  • The Ratline

    The Ratline

    13.50

    Description
    THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER’Hypnotic, shocking and unputdownable’ JOHN LE CARRE’Remarkable’ THE SUNDAY TIMES’Breathtaking, gripping, shattering’ ELIF SHAFAK’A taut and finely crafted factual thriller’ OBSERVER’A triumph of research and brilliant storytelling’ ANTONY BEEVOR’Extraordinary’ EVENING STANDARDIn this riveting real-life thriller, Philippe Sands offers a unique account of the daily life of senior Nazi SS Brigadefuhrer Otto Freiherr von Wachter and his wife, Charlotte. Drawing on a remarkable archive of family letters and diaries, he unveils a fascinating insight into life before and during the war, as a fugitive on the run in the Alps and then in Rome, and into the Cold War. Eventually the door is unlocked to a mystery that haunts Wachter’s youngest son, who continues to believe his father was a good man – what happened to Otto Wachter while he was preparing to travel to Argentina on the ‘ratline’, assisted by a Vatican bishop, and what was the explanation for his sudden and unexpected death?

  • The Mirror and the Light

    The Mirror and the Light

    13.50

    England, May 1536. Anne Boleyn is dead, decapitated in the space of a heartbeat by a hired French executioner.

    As her remains are bundled into oblivion, Thomas Cromwell breakfasts with the victors. The blacksmith’s son from Putney emerges from the spring’s bloodbath to continue his climb to power and wealth, while his formidable master, Henry VIII, settles to short-lived happiness with his third queen, Jane Seymour. Cromwell is a man with only his wits to rely on; he has no great family to back him, no private army.

    Despite rebellion at home, traitors plotting abroad and the threat of invasion testing Henry’s regime to breaking point, Cromwell’s robust imagination sees a new country in the mirror of the future. But can a nation, or a person, shed the past like a skin? Do the dead continually unbury themselves? What will you do, the Spanish ambassador asks Cromwell, when the king turns on you, as sooner or later he turns on everyone close to him?

    With The Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel brings to a triumphant close the trilogy she began with Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. She traces the final years of Thomas Cromwell, the boy from nowhere who climbs to the heights of power, offering a defining portrait of predator and prey, of a ferocious contest between present and past, between royal will and a common man’s vision: of a modern nation making itself through conflict, passion and courage.

    Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020; Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2020;

    Mantel has taken us to the dark heart of history … and what a show‘ The Times

  • Rememberings

    Rememberings

    13.50

    THE LANDMARK MEMOIR OF A GLOBAL MUSIC ICON

    Sinead O’Connor’s voice and trademark shaved head made her famous by the age of twenty-one. Her recording of Prince’s ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ made her a global icon. She outraged millions when she tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on American television.

    O’Connor was unapologetic and impossible to ignore, calling out hypocrisy wherever she saw it. She has remained that way for three decades. Now, in Rememberings, O’Connor tells her story – the heartache of growing up in a family falling apart; her early forays into the Dublin music scene; her adventures and misadventures in the world of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll; the fulfilment of being a mother; her ongoing spiritual quest – and through it all, her abiding passion for music.

    Rememberings is intimate, replete with candid anecdotes and full of hard-won insights. It is a unique and remarkable chronicle by a unique and remarkable artist.

  • 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.

  • 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

  • Great Hatred

    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

  • Teller of the Unexpected

    Teller of the Unexpected

    13.50

    Brand-new biography of Roald Dahl, re-evaluating the received narrative surrounding the life of the much-loved author and creator of numerous iconic literary characters – from one of our finest contemporary biographers. Roald Dahl was one of the world’s greatest storytellers.

    He considered his vocation to be as bold and exciting as an explorer’s and, in his writing for children, he was able to tap into a child’s viewpoint throughout his life. He crafted tales that were exotic in scenario, frequently invested with a moral, and filled with vibrant characters that endure in the public imagination to the present day.

  • A History Of Water

    A History Of Water

    13.50

    From award-winning writer Edward Wilson-Lee, this is a thrilling true historical detective story set in sixteenth-century Portugal. A History of Water follows the interconnected lives of two men across the Renaissance globe. One of them – an aficionado of mermen and Ethiopian culture, an art collector, historian and expert on water-music – returns home from witnessing the birth of the modern age to die in a mysterious incident, apparently the victim of a grisly and curious murder.

    The other – a ruffian, vagabond and braggart, chased across the globe from Mozambique to Japan – ends up as the national poet of Portugal. The stories of Damiao de Gois and Luis de Camoes capture the extraordinary wonders that awaited Europeans on their arrival in India and China, the challenges these marvels presented to longstanding beliefs, and the vast conspiracy to silence the questions these posed about the nature of history and of human life. Like all good mysteries, everyone has their own version of events.

  • All Down Darkness Wide

    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

  • The Sentinel

    The Sentinel

    13.95

    The edge-of-your-seat, heart-in-mouth new Jack Reacher thriller for 2020 – his 25th adventure. No one’s bigger than Jack Reacher. Jack Reacher gets off the bus in a sleepy no-name town outside Nashville, Tennessee.

    He plans to grab a cup of coffee and move right along. Not going to happen. The town has been shut down by a cyber attack.

    At the centre of it all, whetherhe likes it or not, is Rusty Rutherford. He’s an average IT guy, but he knows more than he thinks. As the bad guys move in on Rusty, Reacher moves in on them .

    . . And now Rusty knows he’s protected, he’s never going to leave the big man’s side.

    Reacher might just have to stick around and find out what the hell’s gone wrong . . .and then put it right, like only he can.

  • Hidden in Plain Sight

    Hidden in Plain Sight

    13.95

    Hidden in Plain Sight is the second brilliant and captivating novel featuring William Warwick by the master storyteller and bestselling author of the Clifton Chronicles, Jeffrey Archer. Newly promoted, Detective Sergeant William Warwick has been reassigned to the drugs squad. His first case: to investigate a notorious south London drug lord known as the Viper.

    But as William and his team close the net around a criminal network unlike any they have ever encountered, he is also faced with an old enemy, Miles Faulkner. It will take all of William’s cunning to devise a means to bring both men to justice; a trap neither will expect, one that is hidden in plain sight . ..

    Filled with Jeffrey Archer’s trademark twists and turns, Hidden in Plain Sight is the gripping next instalment in the life of William Warwick. It follows on from Nothing Ventured, but can be read as a standalone story.

  • Braiding Sweetgrass

    Braiding Sweetgrass

    13.95

    As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers.

    In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two ways of knowledge together. Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings – asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass – offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world.

    For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

  • Line

    Line

    13.95

    Willard, his mother and his girlfriend Nyla have spent their entire lives in an endless journey where daily survival is dictated by the ultimate imperative: obey the rules, or you will lose your place in the Line. Everything changes the day Willards mother dies and he finds an incomprehensible book hidden among her few belongings… In its Beckettian sparseness, Line pushes the boundaries of speculative, high concept fiction. Deeply moving, it also touches on many of the pressing issues of our turbulent world: migration and the refugee crisis, big data and the erosion of democracy, climate change, colonialism, economic exploitation, social conformity and religious fanaticism. A stunning debut from a major new voice in Irish literature.

  • The Fixer

    The Fixer

    13.95

    Description
    Meet Meg Monroe, the fixer. If you want to get rid of someone you call Meg. (No, not like that – this would be a very different book!) Using her brilliant intuition, people reading skills and with masterful manipulation Meg befriends her mark and tells them what they want to hear, using it to convince them to see the error of their ways.

    She’s never once found a case she can’t handle – affairs, clingy former-friends, useless employees and exes that can’t take the hint. But when a blast from the past turns up on Meg’s doorstep, will she get caught in her own web of lies?