Books

  • 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

  • Raising Hare

    Raising Hare

    13.50
    Description
    THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES AND NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERWINNER OF THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITINGWINNER OF THE BOOKS ARE MY BAG READERS AWARDSHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION, HATCHARDS AND BIOGRAPHERS’ CLUB FIRST BIOGRAPHY PRIZEA BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR THE HAY FESTIVAL, SUNDAY TIMES, THE TIMES, FINANCIAL TIMES, SPECTATOR, ECONOMIST, iNEWS and TIME’A beautiful book’ – ANGELINA JOLIE’I will be recommending this to everyone’ – MATT HAIG’Quietly profound, beautifully written, Hare is now lodged in my heart’ – TRACY CHEVALIERImagine you could hold a baby hare and bottle-feed it. Imagine that it lived under your roof and lolloped around your bedroom at night, drumming on the duvet cover when it wanted your attention. Imagine that, over two years later, it still ran in from the fields when you called it and snoozed in your house for hours on end.
  • 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?

  • Not A Happy Family

    Not A Happy Family

    13.95

    Description
    Every family has its secrets.

    Fred and Sheila Mercer have worked hard their whole lives. And it’s paid off.

    They have a beautiful house in the dream neighbourhood and their three adult children have always had everything they could have wished for. The family has had it good.

    But now, after a family dinner, the Mercers are dead. Murdered.

    Their children are devastated, aren’t they? Even as they are set to inherit millions. Surely a stranger is responsible and not one of them . .

    .

    This family’s secrets are deadly.

  • Magpie

    Magpie

    13.95
    Description
    ‘Terrifyingly BRILLIANT’MARIAN KEYES, AUTHOR OF GROWN UPS’A book that needed to exist in the world. It is the book that was missing’LISA TADDEO, AUTHOR OF THREE WOMEN AND ANIMAL’Magnificent: I read it one sitting’KATE MOSSE, AUTHOR OF THE CITY OF TEARSSometimes Marisa gets the fanciful notion that Kate has visited the house before. She makes herself at home without any self-consciousness.

    She puts her toothbrush right there in the master bathroom, on the shelf next to theirs.In Jake, Marisa has found everything she’s ever wanted. Then their new lodger Kate arrives. Something about Kate isn’t right.

  • The Paris Apartment

    The Paris Apartment

    13.95

    The new murder mystery thriller from the No.1, million-copy bestseller

    Welcome to No.12 rue des Amants. A beautiful old apartment block, far from the glittering lights of the Eiffel Tower and the bustling banks of the Seine. Where nothing goes unseen, and everyone has a story to unlock. The watchful concierge, The scorned lover, The prying journalist, The naive student, The unwanted guest. There was a murder here last night. A mystery lies behind the door of apartment three. Who holds the key?

    Praise for the No.1 bestseller, Lucy Foley: ‘Gloriously escapist thrills from an Agatha Christie for the Instagram age’ Guardian ‘Thrilling’ The Times ‘Lucy Foley is really very clever’ Anthony Horowitz ‘A very modern Agatha Christie for the new roaring twenties’ Sarah Pinborough ‘Both a classic whodunnit and a very contemporary psychological thriller that left me guessing right to the end’ Kate Mosse

  • The Marriage Portrait

    The Marriage Portrait

    13.95

    Marriage was her destiny. Now she must survive it. The Marriage Portrait is a dazzling evocation of the Italian Renaissance in all its beauty and brutality.

    Winter, 1561. Lucrezia, Duchess of Ferrara, is taken on an unexpected visit to a country villa by her husband, Alfonso. As they sit down to dinner it occurs to Lucrezia that Alfonso has a sinister purpose in bringing her here.

    He intends to kill her. Lucrezia is sixteen years old, and has led a sheltered life locked away inside Florence’s grandest palazzo. Here, in this remote villa, she is entirely at the mercy of her increasingly erratic husband.

    What is Lucrezia to do with this sudden knowledge? What chance does she have against Alfonso, ruler of a province, and a trained soldier? How can she ensure her survival? The Marriage Portrait is an unforgettable reimagining of the life of a young woman whose proximity to power places her in mortal danger.

  • It Starts With Us

    It Starts With Us

    13.95
    Description
    Before It Ends with Us, it started with Atlas. Colleen Hoover tells fan favourite Atlas’ side of the story and shares what comes next in this long-anticipated sequel to the #1 Sunday Times bestseller It Ends with Us.
  • Poor

    Poor

    13.95
    Description
    The No. 1 BestsellerBiography of the Year, Irish Book Awards 2023The Last Word Listeners’ Choice Award, Irish Book Awards 2023’One of the best [books] I have read about the complexities of poverty . .

    . one of the most remarkable people you will ever meet’ GuardianLike young girls everywhere Katriona O’Sullivan grew up bright, enthusiastic, curious. But she was also surrounded by abject poverty and chaos, and after she became pregnant and homeless at 15, what followed was five years of barely surviving.

    Yet today Katriona is an award-winning academic whose work explores barriers to education for girls like her. What set Katriona on this unexpected path were the mentors and supporters who truly saw her. The teachers who showed her how to wash in the school toilets or turned up at her door to convince her to sit at least one GCSE.