Books

  • The Glorious Guinness Girls

    The Glorious Guinness Girls

    11.50

    The Glorious Guinness Girls are the toast of London and Dublin society. Darlings of the press, Aileen, Maureen and Oonagh lead charmed existences that are the envy of many.

    But Fliss knows better. Sent to live with them as a child, she grows up as part of the family and only she knows of the complex lives beneath the glamorous surface.

    Then, at a party one summer’s evening, something happens which sends shockwaves through the entire household.

    In the aftermath, as the Guinness sisters move on, Fliss is forced to examine her place in their world and decide if where she finds herself is where she truly belongs.

    Set amid the turmoil of the Irish Civil War and the brittle glamour of 1920s London, The Glorious Guinness Girls is inspired by one of the most fascinating family dynasties in the world – an unforgettable novel of reckless youth, family loyalty and destiny.

    If you loved Downton Abbey, Julian Fellowes’ Belgravia or Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife, you will adore The Glorious Guinness Girls.

  • The Motion of the body Through Space

    The Motion of the body Through Space

    10.50

    From the Orange Prize-winning author of We Need to Talk About Kevin.

    All her life Serenata has run, swum, and cycled – but now that she’s hit 60, all that physical activity has destroyed her knees. And her previously sedentary husband Remington chooses this precise moment to discover exercise. As he joins the cult of fitness, her once-modest husband burgeons into an unbearable narcissist.

    When he announces his intention to compete in a legendarily gruelling triathlon, Serenata is sure he’s going to end up injured or dead – but the stubbornness of an ageing man in Lycra is not to be underestimated. The story of an obsession, of a marriage, of a betrayal: The Motion Of The Body Through Space is Lionel Shriver at her hilarious, sharp-eyed, audacious best.

  • Ireland's Pirate Trail

    Ireland’s Pirate Trail

    14.95

    Bloodthirsty buccaneers and buried treasure, fierce sea battles and cold-blooded murders, Barbary ducats and silver pieces of eight. Des Ekin embarks on a road trip around the entire coast of Ireland, in search of our piratical heritage, uncovering an amazing history of swashbuckling bandits, both Irish-born and imported. Ireland’s Pirate Trail tells stories of freebooters and pirates from every corner of our coast over a thousand years, including famous pirates like Anne Bonny and William Lamport, who set off to ply their trade in the Caribbean.

    Ekin also debunks many myths about our most well-known sea warrior, Granuaile, the ‘Pirate Queen’ of Mayo. Thoroughly researched and beautifully told. Filled with exciting untold stories.

  • Guard Your Heart

    Guard Your Heart

    9.50

    Boy meets girl on the Northern Irish border.

    Derry. Summer 2016. Aidan and Iona, now eighteen, were both born on the day of the Northern Ireland peace deal.

    Aidan is Catholic, Irish, and Republican. With his ex-political prisoner father gone and his mother dead, Aidan’s hope is pinned on exam results earning him a one-way ticket out of Derry. To anywhere.

    Iona, Protestant and British, has a brother and father in the police. She’s got university ambitions, a strong faith and a fervent belief that boys without one track minds are a myth. At a post-exam party, Aidan wanders alone across the Peace Bridge and becomes the victim of a brutal sectarian attack.

    Iona witnessed the attack; picked up Aidan’s phone and filmed what happened, and gets in touch with him to return the phone. When the two meet, alone and on neutral territory, the differences between them seem insurmountable. Both their fathers held guns, but safer to keep that secret for now.

    Despite their differences and the secrets they have to keep from each other, there is mutual intrigue, and their friendship grows. And so what? It’s not the Troubles. But for both Iona and Aidan it seems like everything is keeping them apart, when all they want is to be together …

  • The Devil and the Dark Water

    The Devil and the Dark Water

    12.50

    Three impossible crimes. Two unlikely detectives. One deadly voyage. It’s 1634 and Samuel Pipps, the world’s greatest detective, is being transported from the Dutch East Indies to Amsterdam, where he is set to face trial for a crime that no one dares speak of. But no sooner is the ship out to sea than devilry begins to blight the voyage.

    Strange symbols appear on the sails. A figure stalks the decks. Livestock are slaughtered.

    Passengers are plagued with ominous threats, promising them three unholy miracles. First: an impossible pursuit. Second: an impossible theft.

    Then: an impossible murder. With Pipps imprisoned in the depths of the ship, can his loyal bodyguard, Arent Hayes, solve the mystery before the ship descends into anarchy?

    From the author of the dazzling The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, winner of the Costa Best First Novel Award, comes an adventurous and wildly entertaining murder mystery.

    Think of a Holmes and Watson-style duo operating in a Pirates Of The Caribbean-style universe‘ Metro

    A glorious mash-up of William Golding and Arthur Conan Doyle‘ Val McDermid

    A superb historical mystery: inventive, twisty, addictive and utterly beguiling … A TRIUMPH‘ Will Dean

    CHOSEN AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE GUARDIAN, SUNDAY TIMES, DAILY MAIL, FINANCIAL TIMES, DAILY EXPRESS AND i PAPER; LONGLISTED FOR THE CWA IAN FLEMING STEEL DAGGER AWARD

  • 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?

  • Shuggie Bain

    Shuggie Bain

    12.50

    Winner of the Booker Prize 2020 Shortlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction 2020 A BBC Radio 2 Between the Covers 2021 Book Choice ‘We were bowled over by this first novel, which creates an amazingly intimate, compassionate, gripping portrait of addiction, courage and love.’ The judges of the Booker Prize ‘Douglas Stuart has written a first novel of rare and lasting beauty.’ – Observer It is 1981. Glasgow is dying and good families must grift to survive. Agnes Bain has always expected more from life.

    She dreams of greater things: a house with its own front door and a life bought and paid for outright (like her perfect, but false, teeth). But Agnes is abandoned by her philandering husband, and soon she and her three children find themselves trapped in a decimated mining town. As she descends deeper into drink, the children try their best to save her, yet one by one they must abandon her to save themselves.

    It is her son Shuggie who holds out hope the longest. Shuggie is different. Fastidious and fussy, he shares his mother’s sense of snobbish propriety.

    The miners’ children pick on him and adults condemn him as no’ right. But Shuggie believes that if he tries his hardest, he can be normal like the other boys and help his mother escape this hopeless place. Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain lays bare the ruthlessness of poverty, the limits of love, and the hollowness of pride.

    A counterpart to the privileged Thatcher-era London of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, it also recalls the work of Edouard Louis, Frank McCourt, and Hanya Yanagihara, a blistering debut by a brilliant writer with a powerful and important story to tell.

  • Dead or Alive

    Dead or Alive

    12.95

    Description
    Skulduggery, Valkyrie and Omen return in the 14th and penultimate novel in the internationally bestselling Skulduggery Pleasant series – and their most epic test yet… In a matter of days, the world will change. Billions of lives will be wiped away in a final, desperate search for the Child of the Faceless Ones – she who is destined to bring about the return of humankind’s ancient overlords.

    To prevent this, Skulduggery Pleasant and Valkyrie Cain have one last – terrible – option: the assassination of Damocles Creed. With protests stirring in the magical city of Roarhaven, with riots and revolutions on the horizon, Valkyrie must decide who she wants to be: the hero who risks everything for a noble ideal, or the killer who sacrifices her own soul for the fate of humanity. The decision must be made, and time is running out.

  • ISLANDS OF CONNAUGHT

    ISLANDS OF CONNAUGHT

    21.95

    CLARK, WALLACE

  • Night Waking

    Night Waking

    10.50

    Historian Anna Bennett has a book to write. She also has an insomniac toddler, a precocious, death-obsessed seven-year-old, and a frequently absent ecologist husband who has brought them all to Colsay, a desolate island in the Hebrides, so he can count the puffins. Ferociously sleep-deprived, torn between mothering and her desire for the pleasures of work and solitude, Anna becomes haunted by the discovery of a baby’s skeleton in the garden of their house.

    Her narrative is punctuated by letters home, written 200 years before, by May, a young, middle-class midwife desperately trying to introduce modern medicine to the suspicious, insular islanders. The lives of these two characters intersect unexpectedly in this deeply moving but also at times blackly funny story about maternal ambivalence, the way we try to control children, and about women’s vexed and passionate relationship with work. Moss’s second novel displays an exciting expansion of her range – showing her to be both an excellent comic writer and a novelist of great emotional depth.

  • Sense and Sensibility

    Sense and Sensibility

    9.95

    Sense and Sensibility is a delightful comedy of manners in which the sisters Elinor and Marianne represent these two qualities. Elinor’s character is one of Augustan detachment, while Marianne, a fervent disciple of the Romantic Age, learns to curb her passionate nature in the interests of survival.

  • To Calais, in Ordinary Time

    To Calais, in Ordinary Time

    12.50

    Three journeys. One road. England, 1348.

    A gentlewoman flees an odious arranged marriage, a proctor sets out for a monastery in Avignon and a young ploughman in search of freedom is on his way to volunteer with a company of archers. All come together on the road to Calais. In the other direction comes the Black Death, the plague that will wipe out half of the population of Northern Europe.

    To Calais, In Ordinary Time is an exploration of love, death and power, against the backdrop of catastrophe.

  • Apeirogon

    Apeirogon

    12.50

    How do we continue living once we have lost our reason to live? Rami and Bassam live in the city of Jerusalem – but exist worlds apart, divided by an age-old conflict.

    And yet they have one thing in common. Both are fathers; both are fathers of daughters – and both daughters are now lost. When Rami and Bassam meet, and tell one another the story of their grief, the most unexpected thing of all happens: they become best of friends.

    And their stories become one story, a story with the power to heal – and the power to change the world.

    The book goes anywhere and everywhere. It is a delirious and thrilling improvisation, a jazz solo spun out of that meeting … A spectacular structure of stories about everything‘ Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times

  • Painting Dublin

    Painting Dublin

    95.00

    Delving into a hitherto unexplored aspect of Irish art history, Painting Dublin, 1886-1949 examines the depiction of Dublin by artists from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Artists’ representations of the city have long been markers of civic pride and identity, yet in Ireland such artworks have been overlooked in favour of the rural and pastoral. Framed by the shift from city of empire to capital of an independent republic, this book examines artworks by Walter Osborne, Rose Barton, Jack B. Yeats, Harry Kernoff, Estella Solomons and Flora Mitchell, encompassing a variety of urban views and artistic themes. While Dublin is already renowned for its representation in literature, this book will demonstrate the many attractions it held for Ireland’s artists, offering a vivid visualisation of the city’s streets and inhabitants at a crucial time in its history.

  • Amnesty

    Amnesty

    9.95

    ADIGA, ARAVIND

  • Sophie's World

    Sophie’s World

    10.95

    The international bestseller about life, the universe and everything. When 14-year-old Sophie encounters a mysterious mentor who introduces her to philosophy, mysteries deepen in her own life. Why does she keep getting postcards addressed to another girl? Who is the other girl? And who, for that matter, is Sophie herself? To solve the riddle, she uses her new knowledge of philosophy, but the truth is far stranger than she could have imagined.

    An addictive blend of mystery, philosophy and fantasy, Sophie’s World is an international phenomenon which has been translated into 60 languages and sold more than 40 million copies.