Books

  • Counterfeit

    Counterfeit

    9.95

    Meet Ava: rule-abiding lawyer who has ticked all of life’s boxes. She’s married to a successful surgeon and has just taken an indefinite career break to raise her adorable toddler. A picture-perfect life.

    Meet Winnie: Ava’s old college roommate. Once awkward, quiet and apparently academically challenged, she left Stanford in a shroud of scandal.

    But now, she is charismatic, wealthy and has returned to town dripping in designer accessories. An actual perfect life. When the two women bump into one another at a local coffee shop, it seems like fate has intervened: Winnie’s new-found success is courtesy of a shady business and she needs a favour; Ava is realising she is not built for the stay-at-home life.

    But what starts as one favour turns into two, then three, and soon Ava is in far deeper than she ever imagined. Now Ava has to make the ultimate decision: cut and run, or risk it all?

  • The Saint of Lost Things

    The Saint of Lost Things

    19.95

    I had dreams once, but never for anything as extravagant as happiness. Still, Auntie Bell and me have fresh cream cakes every Saturday.

    They’re sweet enough to take the edge off. I hope they’re enough to get me through being outed as a fraud. Turns out, I’m more my missing mother’s daughter than anyone first suspected.

    There was a time when Lindy Morris escaped to London and walked along the Thames in the moonlight. When life was full and exciting. Decades later, Lindy lives back with her Auntie Bell on the edge: on the edge of Donegal and on the edge of Granda Morris’s land.

    Granda Morris is a complicated man, a farmer who wanted sons but got two daughters: Auntie Bell and Lindy’s mother, who disappeared long ago. Now, Lindy and Bell live the smallest of lives, in a cottage filled with unfulfilled dreams. But when the secrets they have kept for thirty years emerge, everything is rewritten.

    Will Lindy grasp who she is again?

  • The House of Fortune

    The House of Fortune

    11.95

    The sequel to Jessie Burton’s million-copy bestseller The Miniaturist.

    In the golden city of Amsterdam, in 1705, Thea Brandt is turning eighteen, and she is ready to welcome adulthood with open arms.

    At the city’s theatre, Walter, the love of her life, awaits her, but at home in the house on the Herengracht, all is not well – her father Otto and Aunt Nella argue endlessly, and the Brandt family are selling their furniture in order to eat. On Thea’s birthday, also the day that her mother Marin died, the secrets from the past begin to overwhelm the present. Nella is desperate to save the family and maintain appearances, to find Thea a husband who will guarantee her future, and when they receive an invitation to Amsterdam’s most exclusive ball, she is overjoyed – perhaps this will set their fortunes straight.

    And indeed, the ball does set things spinning: new figures enter their life, promising new futures. But their fates are still unclear, and when Nella feels a strange prickling sensation on the back of her neck, she remembers the miniaturist who entered her life and toyed with her fortunes eighteen years ago. Perhaps, now, she has returned for her…

    The House of Fortune is a glorious, sweeping story of fate and ambition, secrets and dreams, and one young woman’s determination to rule her own destiny.

  • Cathal Brugha An Indomitable Spirit

    Cathal Brugha An Indomitable Spirit

    24.95

    By any measure, Cathal Brugha’s life was extraordinary: a member of the Gaelic League, Irish Republican Brotherhood and Irish Volunteers; a celebrated survivor of the 1916 Rising, despite multiple gunshot wounds; a crucial figure in the post-Rising reorganization of the Volunteers and Sinn Féin; speaker at the first sitting of Dáil Éireann and president pro tempore; minister for defence in the underground government during the War of Independence; passionate and acerbic opponent of the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921; a reluctant participant in the Irish civil war, having tried to prevent it; and that conflict’s first high profile fatality in July 1922.

    Based on exhaustive research, this book challenges the often simplistic and reductive depiction of Brugha by providing a nuanced and multi-layered reappraisal of him. It chronicles his public and private life and the influences that shaped him; assesses his multifaceted involvement in the Irish Revolution and his uncompromising commitment to an Irish republic; contextualizes his relationships with contemporaries such as Michael Collins, Éamon de Valera and Richard Mulcahy; explores how his premature death at the age of forty-seven affected his young family and how his wife, Caitlín, upheld his political principles by standing as a Sinn Féin TD; and reflects on how Brugha’s indomitable patriotism was propagandized after his death. The result is a fascinating portrait of a complex, tenacious, and often misunderstood figure.

  • The Whalebone Theatre

    The Whalebone Theatre

    12.50

    This is the story of an old English manor house by the sea, with crumbling chimneys, draping ivy and a library full of dusty hardbacks. It’s the story of the three children who grow up there, and the adventures they create for themselves while the grown-ups entertain endless party guests: the worlds they imagine from books they aren’t supposed to read, and the lessons they learn from eavesdropping through oak-panelled doors. This is the story of a whale that washes up on a beach, whose bones are claimed by a twelve-year-old girl with big ambitions and an even bigger imagination.

    An unwanted orphan who grows into an unmarriageable young woman, chafing under the confines of her traditional upbringing and fiercely determined to do things differently. But as the children grow to adulthood, another story has been unfolding in the wings. And when the war finally takes centre stage, they find themselves cast, unrehearsed, into roles they never expected to play.

    They raised themselves on stories. Now it’s time for them to write their own …

  • The Yoga Manifesto

    The Yoga Manifesto

    17.95

    How did an ancient spiritual practice become the preserve of the privileged?

    Nadia Gilani has been practising yoga as a participant and teacher for over twenty-five years. Yoga has saved her life and seen her through many highs and lows; it has been a faith, a discipline, and a friend, and she believes wholeheartedly in its radical potential. However, over her years in the wellness industry, Nadia has noticed not only yoga’s rising popularity, but also how its modern incarnation no longer serves people of colour, working class people, or many other groups who originally pioneered its creation.

    Combining her own memories of how the practice has helped her with an account of its history and transformation in the modern west, Nadia creates a love letter to yoga and a passionate critique of the billion-dollar industry whose cost and inaccessibility has shut out many of those it should be helping. By turns poignant, funny, and shocking, The Yoga Manifesto excavates where the industry has gone wrong, and what can be done to save the practice from its own success.

  • Oh William!

    Oh William!

    12.50

    SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2022

    THE TOP 10 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

    The Pulitzer Prize-winning, Booker-longlisted, bestselling author returns to her beloved heroine Lucy Barton in a luminous novel about love, loss, and the family secrets that can erupt and bewilder us at any point in life. Lucy Barton is a successful writer living in New York, navigating the second half of her life as a recent widow and parent to two adult daughters. A surprise encounter leads her to reconnect with William, her first husband – and long-time, on-again-off-again friend and confidante. Recalling their college years, the birth of their daughters, the painful dissolution of their marriage, and the lives they built with other people, Strout weaves a portrait, stunning in its subtlety, of a tender, complex, decades-long partnership.

    Oh William! captures the joy and sorrow of watching children grow up and start families of their own; of discovering family secrets, late in life, that alter everything we think we know about those closest to us; and the way people live and love, against all odds. At the heart of this story is the unforgettable, indomitable voice of Lucy Barton, who once again offers a profound, lasting reflection on the mystery of existence. ‘This is the way of life,’ Lucy says. ‘The many things we do not know until it is too late.’

    ‘A superbly gifted storyteller and a craftswoman in a league of her own’ Hilary Mantel

    ‘A terrific writer’ Zadie Smith

    ‘She gets better with each book’ Maggie O’Farrell

    ‘One of America’s finest writers’ Sunday Times

    ‘This is meticulously observed writing, full of probing psychological insight. Lucy Barton is one of literature’s immortal characters – brittle, damaged, unravelling, vulnerable and, most of all, ordinary – like us all’ Booker Prize Judges

  • Brouhaha

    Brouhaha

    14.95

    The razor-sharp, violent and darkly comic second novel from actor, comedian and writer Ardal O’Hanlon. Dove Connolly is dead. That’s not good for anyone in Tullyanna, never mind Dove.

    Now his best friend Sharkey is home asking awkward questions about Dove’s death, about the strange graphic novel he left behind, and, most of all, about Sandra. Sandra Mohan. Missing now for over a decade, whereabouts unknown.

    This, however, is a town dead-set on keeping its secrets. And Sharkey is already drawing attention from all the wrong quarters… A mystery, a black comedy, a satire on Ireland’s tangled politics of memory, Brouhaha is set in a small town on the Irish border during the uneasy transition to peace.

    And peace doesn’t come easy in these parts. *****Over the past few days, Kevin, no flies on him, had sensed a tension in the town thanks to Dove Connolly’s poor decision to blow his own head off. It wasn’t just the act of self-harm itself, the pointless splattering of blood and bone and brain all over his bedroom wall, that was the issue, unsettling as that was.

    In so doing, poor Dove had spread panic amongst the townspeople, raising all sorts of ugly questions, reviving all sorts of rumours, and inviting all sorts of unwelcome attention upon them. In Kevin’s mind, there was method in Dove’s madness. Showing a shocking assertiveness for possibly the first time in his life, and the last, says you, Dove blew the lid off the whole town.

  • Book Lovers

    Book Lovers

    10.95

    Nora is a cut-throat literary agent at the top of her game. Her whole life is books. Charlie is an editor with a gift for creating bestsellers.

    And he’s Nora’s work nemesis. Nora has been through enough break-ups to know she’s the one men date before finding their happy-ever-after. To prevent another dating dud, Nora’s sister has persuaded her to swap her city desk for a month’s holiday in Sunshine Falls.

    It’s a small town straight out of a romance novel, but instead of meeting sexy lumberjacks, handsome doctors or cute bartenders, Nora keeps bumping into…Charlie. She’s no heroine. He’s no hero.

    So can they take a page out of an entirely different book?Brimming with witty banter, characters you can’t help but fall for and off-the-charts chemistry, BOOK LOVERS is Emily Henry’s best novel yet.

  • Ruth + Pen

    Ruth + Pen

    15.00
    Description

    The brilliant debut novel from Emilie Pine, author of the international bestseller NOTES TO SELF

    Dublin, 7 October 2019

    One day, one city, two women: Ruth and Pen. Neither known to the other, but both asking themselves the same questions: how to be with others and how, when the world doesn’t seem willing to make space for them, to be with themselves?

    Ruth’s marriage to Aidan is in crisis. Today she needs to make a choice – to stay or not to stay, to take the risk of reaching out, or to pull up the drawbridge.

    For teenage Pen, today is the day the words will flow, and she will speak her truth to Alice, to ask for what she so desperately wants.

    Deeply involving, poignant and radiantly intelligent, it is a portrait of the limits of grief and love, of how we navigate our inner and outer landscapes, and the tender courage demanded by the simple, daily quest of living.

  • In the Shadow of Benbulben

    In the Shadow of Benbulben

    19.95
    Description

    In January 1939, just months after hanging up his boots and a few weeks into his new career as a talent scout, William Ralph ‘Dixie’ Dean, the former Everton and England legend, received a surprise request for assistance from the far west of Ireland. Could he find a goalscorer for Sligo Rovers – the beating heart of a small, provincial town – to drive their dreams of a lucrative cup run and help protect the club’s very existence? Dean set about finding the right man, but unable to locate candidates willing to make the move across the Irish Sea, he had an idea. What if he were to answer Sligo’s call? And so began the unlikely story of how one of the greatest centre-forwards ever to grace the game added an unexpected and ultimately uplifting chapter to his storied football career.

    In the Shadow of Benbulben is a romantic tale of divine intervention, uncanny timing and drama on and off the pitch. It’s the tale of ‘Dixie’ Dean’s four months with the Bit O’Red that was to leave an indelible mark on the player, the club and the town.

  • In Love

    In Love

    15.50

    In January 2020, Amy Bloom travelled with her husband Brian to Switzerland, where he was helped by Dignitas to end his life while Amy sat with him and held his hand. Brian was terminally ill and for the last year of his life Amy had struggled to find a way to support his wish to take control of his death, to not submerge ‘into the darkness of an expiring existence’. Written with piercing insight and wit, In Love is Bloom’s intimate, authentic and startling account of losing Brian, first slowly to the disease of Alzheimer’s, and then on becoming a widow.

    It charts the anxiety and pain of the process that led them to Dignitas, while never avoiding the complex ethical problems that are raised by assisted death. A poignant love letter to Bloom’s husband and a passionate outpouring of grief, In Love reaffirms the power and value of human relationships.

  • Ammu

    Ammu

    29.95

    Indian family food with heart – the mouthwatering new cookbook from Asma Khan, founder of the iconic Darjeeling ExpressThis book is a joyful celebration of the universal power of food to restore, and to comfort. It is a tribute to Ammu, Asma’s mother, to the simple home cooking from her kitchen in Calcutta, and an exploration of the inextricable link between food and love. These dishes will bring warmth to your kitchen when you need a meal or dish to share with your family and friends – from quick-and-easy Baghare Aloo and Shahi Paneer, a vegetarian staple all ages love, to Ammu’s Chicken Biriyani the much-requested Darjeeling Express favourite.

    With over 100 recipes, easy-to-follow instructions and a photograph for every dish Ammu is an essential book for anyone wanting to make Indian comfort food at home. ‘This is the food I cook for my family every day, meals to restore and nourish. I give these recipes to you, with love.’ – Asma

  • Young Mungo

    Young Mungo

    10.00

    Born under different stars, Protestant Mungo and Catholic James live in a hyper-masculine world. They are caught between two of Glasgow’s housing estates where young working-class men divide themselves along sectarian lines, and fight territorial battles for the sake of reputation. They should be sworn enemies if they’re to be seen as men at all, and yet they become best friends as they find a sanctuary in the doocot that James has built for his prize racing pigeons.

    As they begin to fall in love, they dream of escaping the grey city, and Mungo must work hard to hide his true self from all those around him, especially from his elder brother Hamish, a local gang leader with a brutal reputation to uphold. But the threat of discovery is constant and the punishment unspeakable. When Mungo’s mother sends him on a fishing trip to a loch in Western Scotland, with two strange men behind whose drunken banter lie murky pasts, he needs to summon all his inner strength and courage to get back to a place of safety, a place where he and James might still have a future. Imbuing the everyday world of its characters with rich lyricism, Douglas Stuart’s Young Mungo is a gripping and revealing story about the meaning of masculinity, the push and pull of family, the violence faced by so many queer people, and the dangers of loving someone too much.

  • None of This is Serious

    None of This is Serious

    14.95

    Dublin student life is ending for Sophie and her friends. They’ve got everything figured out, and Sophie feels left behind as they all start to go their separate ways. She’s overshadowed by her best friend Grace.

    She’s been in love with Finn for as long as she’s known him. And she’s about to meet Rory, who’s suddenly available to her online. At a party, what was already unstable completely falls apart and Sophie finds herself obsessively scrolling social media, waiting for something (anything) to happen.

    None of This Is Serious is about the uncertainty and absurdity of being alive today. It’s about balancing the real world with the online, and the vulnerabilities in yourself, your relationships, your body. At its heart, this is a novel about the friendships strong enough to withstand anything.

  • Seven Steeples

    Seven Steeples

    14.95

    The mountain remained, unclimbed, for the first year that they lived there. Bell and Sigh, a couple in the infancy of their relationship, cut themselves off from friends and family. They turn their backs on a city divided by scores of streets and hundreds of sterile cherry trees, by a foul river and a declining population of house sparrows.

    Them in and the world out. From the top of the nearby mountain, they are told, you can see seven standing stones, seven schools, and seven steeples. All you have to do is climb.

    Taking place in a remote house in the south-west of Ireland, this rich and vivid novel spans seven years and speaks to the times we live in, asking how we may withdraw, how better to live in the natural world, and how the choices made or avoided lead us home.