Books

  • Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother's Secrets

    Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets

    23.95

    WILLS, CLAIR

  • My Favourite Mistake

    My Favourite Mistake

    16.95

    Anna has just lost her taste for the Big Apple…

    She has a life to envy. An apartment in New York. A well-meaning (too well-meaning?) partner.

    And a high-flying job in beauty PR. Who wouldn’t want all that?
    Anna, it turns out.

    Trading a minor midlife crisis for a major life event, she switches the skyscrapers of Manhattan for the tiny Irish town of Maumtully (population 1,217), helping old friends Brigit and Colm set up a luxury coastal retreat.

    Tougher than it sounds. Newflash: the locals hate the idea.

    So much so, there have been threats – and violence.

    Anna, however, worked in the beauty industry. There’s no ugliness she hasn’t seen. No wrinkle she can’t smooth over.

    There’s just one fly in the ointment – old flame Joey Armstrong.

    He’s going to be her wingman.
    Never mind their chequered history.

    Never mind what might have been.

    Because no matter how far you go, your mistakes will still be waiting for you . . .

  • Blue Sisters

    Blue Sisters

    16.95

    The Blue sisters have always been exceptional – and exceptionally different.

    Avery, a strait-laced lawyer living in London, is the typical eldest daughter, though she’s hiding a secret that could undo her perfect life forever. Bonnie was a boxer but, following a devastating defeat, she’s been working as a bouncer in LA – until a reckless act one night threatens to drive her out of the city. And Lucky, the rebellious youngest, is a model in Paris whose hard-partying ways are finally catching up with her. Then there was Nicky, the beloved fourth sister, whose unexpected death left Avery, Bonnie and Lucky reeling. When, a year later, the three of them must reunite in New York to stop the sale of their childhood home, they find that it’s only by returning to each other that they can navigate their grief, addiction and heartbreak and learn to fall in love with life again.

  • Prophet Song

    Prophet Song

    12.50
    Description
    WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2023SHORTLISTED FOR THE AN POST IRISH BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023SHORTLISTED FOR THE STREGA EUROPEAN PRIZEA SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERA NEW YORK TIMES EDITOR’S CHOICEAN AMAZON TOP 10 BOOK OF DECEMBER 2023A Book of the Year for 2023 according to the Guardian, FT, Irish Independent, Irish Examiner, Sunday Independent, Economist, Big Issue, Daily Telegraph, Irish Times and Waterstones’A CRUCIAL BOOK FOR OUR CURRENT TIMES… BRILLIANTLY HAUNTING.’ OBSERVERThe explosive literary sensation: a mother faces a terrible choice as Ireland slides into totalitarianism On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, Larry, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart.
  • Sale! You Are Here

    You Are Here

    Original price was: €16.95.Current price is: €15.95.
    Description

    A highlight for 2024 for the Sunday TimesGuardianIndependentNew StatesmaniObserverGraziaGQIrish TimesSunday IndependentPrima, Good Housekeeping

    ‘Magnificent’ MARIAN KEYES
    ‘A beautiful book’ TRACY CHEVALIER
    ‘Genius . . .

    another classic and funny love story’ MATT HAIG
    ‘I don’t know how he does it, but he’s the only person who can’ ELIZABETH DAY
    ‘I loved it’ BONNIE GARMUS
    ‘Perfect’ CLARE CHAMBERS

    Sometimes you need to get lost to find your way

    Marnie is stuck.
    Stuck working alone in her London flat, stuck battling the long afternoons and a life that often feels like it’s passing her by.

    Michael is coming undone.
    Reeling from his wife’s departure, increasingly reclusive, taking himself on long, solitary walks across the moors and fells.

    When a persistent mutual friend and some very English weather conspire to bring them together, Marnie and Michael suddenly find themselves alone on the most epic of walks and on the precipice of a new friendship.

  • Long Island

    Long Island

    15.95
    Description

    ‘Heartbreak, wistfulness, cracking dialogue . . .

    This is Tóibín at his best’ – The Times’A masterful novel full of longing and regret . . .

    Intensely moving and yet full of restraint’ – Douglas Stuart, author of Shuggie BainOPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICKAS HEARD ON BBC RADIO 4Long Island is Colm Tóibín’s masterpiece: an exquisite, exhilarating novel that asks whether it is possible to truly return to the past and renew the great love that seemed gone forever. The sequel to Colm Tóibín’s prize-winning, bestselling novel Brooklyn. A man with an Irish accent knocks on Eilis Fiorello’s door on Long Island and in that moment everything changes.

    Eilis and Tony have built a secure, happy life here since leaving Brooklyn – perhaps a little stifled by the in-laws so close, but twenty years married and with two children looking towards a good future. And yet this stranger will reveal something that will make Eilis question the life she has created. For the first time in years she suddenly feels very far from home and the revelation will see her turn towards Ireland once again.

    Back to her mother. Back to the town and the people she had chosen to leave behind. Did she make the wrong choice marrying Tony all those years ago? Is it too late now to take a different path?

  • Old Romantics

    Old Romantics

    16.00

    A few years ago my husband recommended me for a job in his company, and I thought it would be fun, and soa woman named Rosaleen would ring me for a chat. Rosaleen was a senior director in the firm, and these were scheduled chats, but I was always unprepared, running from a room, looking for a pen, or out in the rain, pushing the baby in the pram. Rosaleen had a terse and serious manner that unwound into listless expectation when my turn came to speak.I would say something and she would wait for me to say something better. Rosaleen savoured a pause. The line burned with a shared misgiving even as Rosaleen made me an astounding offer …”‘Old Romantics’ is an acutely observed and hideously entertaining collection of linked short stories from an astonishing new talent.Slippery, flawed and acute, Maggie Armstrong’s narrator navigates a world of awkward expectation and latent hostility.

  • Quickly, While They Still Have Horses

    Quickly, While They Still Have Horses

    17.50

    In sixteen sparkling stories, Jan Carson introduces us to worlds and characters that feel real enough to touch. All of life is here: the thrill of growing up, the grief when youth is over; first love, mature love, parenthood and loss – all shot through with profound compassion, warm wit, and boundless imagination.
    In ‘A Certain Degree of Ownership’, a distracted couple on a beach fail to notice their baby crawl perilously towards the sea.
    In ‘Troubling the Water’, a rumour spreads at a public swimming pool and chaos ensues. In ‘Fair Play’ a dishevelled father loses his two sons in an adventure park.
    Every so often, an irresistible suggestion of the other world will surprise and delight, reaffirming Carson as a thrillingly original and audacious talent, and making Quickly, While They Still Have Horses the perfect introduction for readers new to her work.

  • Hagstone

    Hagstone

    16.50

    The sea is steady for now. The land readies itself. What can be done with the woman on the cliff?On a wild and rugged island cut off and isolated to some, artist Nell feels the island is her home.It is the source of inspiration for her art, rooted in landscape, folklore and the feminine. The mysterious Inions, a commune of women who have travelled there from all over the world, consider it a place of refuge and safety, of solace in nature.All the islanders live alongside the strange murmurings that seem to emanate from within the depths of the island, a sound that is almost supernatural – a Summoning as the Inions call it. One day, a letter arrives at Nell’s door from the reclusive Inions who invite Nell into the commune for a commission to produce a magnificent art piece to celebrate their long history.In its creation, Nell will discover things about the community and about herself that will challenge everything she thought she knew.Beautifully written, prescient and eerily haunting, Sinead Gleeson’s debut novel takes in the darker side of human nature and the mysteries of faith and the natural world.

  • A Mirror Looking Out

    A Mirror Looking Out

    12.00

    FERRIS, GORDON

  • The Kidnapping

    The Kidnapping

    18.95

    November 1983. As top supermarket executive Don Tidey sets out on the school run, he is snatched from his car and driven away at speed. The IRA, using kidnapping to fund its armed campaign, has its latest victim.

    What follows is a massive manhunt and, twenty-three days later, a chaotic rescue in a Leitrim wood. No one emerges unscathed – not the man at the centre of the drama, not the local community, not the gardai, not the Irish state. And especially not the families of the soldier and the young garda killed as Tidey is freed.

    Powerful, intimate and searching, The Kidnapping is a brilliantly reported account of an iconic episode. At its heart are remarkable interviews with Don Tidey, talking about these events in detail for the first time, and with the families of Private Kelly and Garda Sheehan who explain the devastating fall-out for them. The book also raises thought-provoking questions about the legacy of these events for today’s Ireland.

  • Madhouse

    Madhouse

    19.95

    I grew up in a psychiatric experiment crossed with an alcoholic experiment . . . a place run by two people who were extraordinarily drunk and guarded by a potentially vicious dog with a brain tumour.

    PJ Gallagher spent much of his childhood knocking back Lucozade with the local alcoholics in his parents’ northside pub. But the chaos that reigned for his first ten years was nothing compared to what happened when – having lost the pub – his mum took in six psychiatric patients from the local hospital to give them ‘care in the community’.

    Worst. Idea. Ever.

    Madhouse is PJ’s riotous life story. Covering everything from dogs, motorbikes and the art of small talk, to the lessons of mental breakdown and finally figuring out love, this is PJ unbound. Most surprising – to PJ more than anyone – is the prospect of becoming a dad in his late forties, when he always thought of ‘family’ as a trap.

    Madhouse is the funny, insightful and moving story of someone just trying to keep his head above water – and how he is making sense of it all at last!

  • White Holes

    White Holes

    17.50

    A mesmerizing trip to the strange new world of white holes, from Carlo Rovelli, the bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics.

    Let us journey into the heart of a black hole. Let us slip beyond its boundary, the horizon, and tumble – on and on – down this crack in the universe. As we plunge, we’ll see geometry fold, we’ll feel the equations draw tight around us.

    Eventually, we’ll pass it: the remains of a star, deep and dense and falling further far. And then – the bottom. Where time and space end, and the white hole is born . . . With lightness and magic, here Carlo Rovelli traces the ongoing adventure of his own cutting-edge research, of the uncertainty and joy of going where we’ve not yet been.

    Guiding us to the edge of theory and experiment, he invites us to go beyond, to experience the fever and the disquiet of science. Here is the extraordinary life of a white hole.

  • Chasing Sam Maguire

    Chasing Sam Maguire

    34.95

    It is almost one hundred years since the Sam Maguire Cup was first awarded to the winner of the All-Ireland Football Championship, the pinnacle of sporting ambition for generations of Gaelic footballers. Here, we celebrate all the heartbreak and glory of the first fifty years of its history. Since it was first presented in 1928, to Kildare, who beat Cavan by a single point, the Sam Maguire has become one of the most treasured pieces of silverware in Irish sport.

    Dermot Reilly and Colm Keys have created an absorbing record of the first fifty years of Sam. Thrilling accounts of the run-up to each final and the finals themselves are included, along with the names and home clubs for every player to have graced the field in those All-Ireland finals. A ‘must’ for every GAA enthusiast, Chasing Sam Maguire is an enthralling account of the agony and the ecstasy of the pursuit of Ireland’s biggest sporting prize.

  • Dirty Linen

    Dirty Linen

    22.95

    Martin Doyle, Books Editor of The Irish Times, offers a personal, intimate history of the Troubles seen through the microcosm of a single rural parish, his own, part of both the Linen Triangle – heartland of the North’s defining industry – and the Murder Triangle – the Badlands devastated by paramilitary violence. He lifts the veil of silence drawn over the horrors of the past, recording in heartrending detail the terrible toll the conflict took – more than twenty violent deaths in a few square miles – and the long trail of trauma it has left behind.

    Neighbours and classmates who lost loved ones in the conflict, survivors maimed in bomb attacks and victims of sectarianism, both Catholic and Protestant, entrust Doyle with their stories. Writing with a literary sensibility, he skillfully shows how the once dominant local linen industry serves as a metaphor for communal division but also for the solidarity that transcended the sectarian divide. To those who might ask why you would want to reopen old wounds, the answer might be that some wounds have never been allowed to heal.

  • Born to be a Footballer

    Born to be a Footballer

    19.95

    “Being a footballer was my destiny.” After being expelled from school for playing football for his country, fifteen-year-old Liam Brady travelled to London to join Arsenal, and soon became an indispensable part of their glorious 1970s team. Rightly considered one of the Republic of Ireland’s best-ever footballers, he went on to enjoy successes with Juventus, Sampdoria and West Ham, as well as managing Celtic and Brighton and Hove, and becoming assistant manager of his national team. Today he is best known for his much-respected TV punditry and searingly intelligent insights into the game he adores.

    Full of honest insights, amusing anecdotes and recollections of extraordinary times, with Born to be a Footballer Brady delivers a compelling story of a fifty-year career that is unparalleled in Irish sport.