sellable

  • Poor

    Poor

    16.50

    As the middle of five kids growing up in dire poverty, the odds were low on Katriona O’Sullivan making anything of her life. When she became a mother at 15 and ended up homeless, what followed were five years of barely coping.

    This is the extraordinary story – moving, funny, brave, and sometimes startling – of how Katriona turned her life around. How the seeds of self-belief planted by teachers in childhood stayed with her. How she found mentors whose encouragement revived those seeds in adulthood.

    Katriona is now an award-winning lecturer whose work challenges barriers to education. Poor is her stirring argument for the importance of looking out for our kids’ futures. Of giving them hope, practical support and meaningful opportunities.

  • The Book of Fire

    The Book of Fire

    16.50

    This morning, I met the man who started the fire. He did something terrible, but then, so have I. I left him.

    I left him and now he may be dead. Once upon a time there was a beautiful village that held a million stories of love and loss and peace and war, and it was swallowed up by a fire that blazed up to the sky. The fire ran all the way down to the sea where it met with its reflection.

    A family from two nations, England and Greece, live a simple life on a tiny Greek island: Irini, Tasso and their daughter, lovely, sweet Chara, whose name means joy. Their life goes up in flames in a single day when one man starts a fire out of greed and indifference. Many are killed, homes are destroyed, and the island’s natural beauty wiped out.

    In the wake of the fire, Chara bears deep scars across her back and arms. Tasso is frozen in trauma, devastated that he wasn’t there when his family most needed him. And Irini is crippled by guilt at her part in the fate of the man who started the fire.

    But this family has survived, and slowly green shoots of hope and renewal will grow from the smouldering ruins of devastation. Once again, Christy Lefteri has crafted a novel which is intimate and epic, sweeping and delicate. The Book of Fire explores not only the damage wrought by human folly, but also – and ultimately – our powers of redemption and renewal.

  • Camino Royale

    Camino Royale

    14.95

    ‘The name’s O’Carroll-Kelly. Ross O’Carroll-Kelly.’As the great James Bond said, ‘History isn’t kind to men who play God.’ How right the dude ended up being. My secret double-life was finally catching up with me.

    Sorcha wanted a divorce. I was facing jail time for taking my orse out in a pub in Cork. And there was a very good chance that my sister-in-law’s surrogate baby was actually mine? One by one, all of the goys turned their backs on me.

    Then came an unexpected plot twist. From beyond the grave, Fr Fehily – the M and the Q to our Leinster Schools Senior Cup-winning team – sent us all on one final mission . . . To walk the Camino – or die trying! It’s, like, double oh fock!

  • In Ascension

    In Ascension

    16.50

    Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, travelling the globe to study ancient organisms. When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of the earth’s first life forms – what she instead finds calls into question everything we know about our own beginnings.

    Her discovery leads Leigh to the Mojave desert and an ambitious new space agency.

    Drawn deeper into the agency’s work, she learns that the Atlantic trench is only one of several related phenomena from across the world, each piece linking up to suggest a pattern beyond human understanding. Leigh knows that to continue working with the agency will mean leaving behind her declining mother and her younger sister, and faces an impossible choice: to remain with her family, or to embark on a journey across the breadth of the cosmos.

    Exploring the natural world with the wonder and reverence we usually reserve for the stars, In Ascension is a compassionate, deeply inquisitive epic that reaches outward to confront the greatest questions of existence, looks inward to illuminate the smallest details of the human heart, and shows how – no matter how far away we might be and how much we have lost hope – we will always attempt to return to the people and places we call home.

  • Ravensong

    Ravensong

    17.95

    Set in the dreamy backwoods of Oregon, Ravensong is a queer, paranormal romance of burning passion and pack loyalty, and is the sequel to Wolfsong.

    Gordo Livingstone never forgot the lessons carved into his skin. Hardened by the betrayal of a pack who left him behind, he sought solace in the garage in his tiny mountain town, vowing never again to involve himself in the affairs of wolves.

    It should have been enough.

    And it was, until the wolves came back, and with them, Mark Bennett. In the end, they faced the beast together as a pack . . . and won.

    Now, a year later, Gordo has found himself once again the witch of the Bennett pack. Green Creek has settled after the death of Richard Collins, and Gordo constantly struggles to ignore Mark and the song that howls between them.

    But time is running out. Something is coming. And this time, it’s crawling from within.

    Some bonds, no matter how strong, were made to be broken.

    Ravensong is the second book in TJ Klune’s beloved Green Creek series. Continue the journey with Heartsong.

  • Masters of Death

    Masters of Death

    17.50

    This book is about an estate agent. Only she’s a vampire, the house on sale is haunted, and its ghost was murdered.

    When Viola Marek hires Fox D’Mora to deal with her ghost-infested mansion, she expects a competent medium. But unbeknownst to Viola, Fox is a fraud – despite being the godson of Death.

    As the mystery unfolds, Viola and Fox are drawn into a quest that neither wants nor expects. And they’ll need the help of a demonic personal trainer, a sharp-voiced angel and a love-stricken reaper. And it transpires that the difference between a mysterious lost love and a dead body isn’t nearly as distinct as you’d hope.

    This edition features beautiful interior illustrations from Little Chmura.

  • The Lodgers

    The Lodgers

    15.95

    One house. Three strangers. A second chance at happiness.

    Tessa’s life as an activist and volunteer worker takes a hit after a fall. At the ripe young age of 69, she’s no longer able to live alone and decides to take in two lodgers for free. After the recent death of his brother, Conn is riddled with grief and determined to make amends.

    A free room seems too good to be true – until he meets the other lodger. Chloe arrives at Tessa’s house to deliver a package and leaves with a room. But she takes an instant dislike to Conn, who refuses to say where he disappears to at night.

    With everyone so busy keeping their own secrets, the mysterious package is forgotten. It’s addressed to Tessa’s daughter who’s been missing for 10 years – and only the contents have the answer to what happened …

  • Cures of Ireland

    Cures of Ireland

    22.95

    A fascinating new book celebrating Ireland’s rich tradition of folk cures, medicines and charms.

    It’s said that almost everyone in Ireland, particularly in rural communities, will know of someone with a ‘cure’. It might be for the mumps, a stye in the eye, or a sprain. Indeed the author of Cures of Ireland, Cecily Gilligan was herself cured of jaundice and ringworm by a ‘seventh son’ in her local Sligo during her childhood.

    Cecily Gilligan has been researching the rich world of Irish folk cures for almost forty years and, given the tradition has largely been an oral one, has been interviewing a broad range of people from around the country who possess these mystical cures, and those who have benefited from their gifts. One has a cure for eczema that comprises herbal butter balls, another ‘buys’ warts from the sufferer with safety pins. There are stories of clay from graves with precious healing properties and pieces of cords from potato bags being sent across the world to treat asthma.

    While the Ireland of the twenty-first century continues to develop at lightning speed, there is something deeply comforting and reassuring in the fact that these ancient healing traditions, while fewer in number, do survive to this day.

    Cures of Ireland is an exquisite book that will be treasured by many generations to come.

  • Though The Bodies Fall

    Though The Bodies Fall

    15.95

    From an exciting new voice in Irish fiction, a powerful novel set on an Irish clifftop – a story about duty, despair and the chance encounters upon which fate turns. Micheal Burns lives alone in his family’s bungalow at the end of Kerry Head in Ireland. It is a picturesque place, but the cliffs have a darker side to them: for generations they have been a suicide black spot.

    Micheal’s mother saw the saving of these lost souls – these visitors – as her spiritual duty, and now, in the wreckage of his life, Micheal finds himself continuing her work. When his sisters tell him that they want to sell the land, he must choose between his siblings and the visitors, a future or a past.

  • Chasing Shadows

    Chasing Shadows

    19.95

    Three very different men battle to control their destinies as they hurtle through the hall of mirrors of the global shadow economy.

    Jack Kelly, a veteran US Drug Enforcement Administration agent, tasked with following a trail of dirty money across continents from a top-secret investigative unit based in Virginia.

    Salvatore Pititto is an ambitious Mafia capo working on a vast cocaine shipment who becomes unexpectedly pulled into an arms-smuggling conspiracy.

    Mustafa Badreddine is a ghost-like master terrorist wanted by governments across the world who has been secretly dispatched to Syria for his final mission.

    Each man, born in radically different circumstances in the 1960s, is in his own way grappling with the powerful and unstoppable forces that shape the world around us; forces which topple governments, send refugees fleeing across borders, and put guns in the hands of mercenaries and militias. Each has devoted his whole life to an institution – the DEA, the Mafia and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah – and each will eventually be destroyed or betrayed by the thing they believe in the most.

    Set during 2015 and 2016, as the global order began to implode under the pressures of the Syrian civil war and the European refugee crisis, CHASING SHADOWS looks back over the historical conflicts, events and personal histories that have shaped the lives of these three men. It’s a book that shows the betrayals, the disillusionment and the violence as Jack Kelly hunts down his targets.

  • The Desire Line

    The Desire Line

    15.95

    Home is where the heart is but what if that home has been erased?

    Discharged from a psychiatric ward after an apparent murder-suicide perpetrated by her partner Malachy, feared drowned, Helena is driven to the beautiful peninsula of Islandmagee, north of Belfast, by new friends Jer and Nora McCabe. There she finds the house she shared with Malachy has been cleared off the face of the earth . . . or so she claims.

    Maverick TV producer and investigative journalist Jer wonders whether Helena is victim or villain, but tries to help for the sake of his vulnerable wife who has befriended this unsettling woman.

    Amid echoes of the infamous Islandmagee witch trial, Jer and his family are drawn into a disturbing chain of events which reach their climax on an Islandmagee hillside on Halloween night.

  • Study for Obedience

    Study for Obedience

    15.50

    NAMED AS ONE OF GRANTA MAGAZINE’S BEST OF YOUNG BRITISH NOVELISTS 2023

    A woman moves from the place of her birth to a remote northern country to be housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has just left him. The youngest child of many siblings – more than she cares to remember – from earliest childhood she has attended to their every desire, smoothed away the slightest discomfort with perfect obedience, with the highest degree of devotion. The country, it transpires, is the country of their family’s ancestors, an obscure though reviled people.

    Soon after she arrives, a series of unfortunate events occurs – collective bovine hysteria; the demise of a ewe and her nearly-born lamb; a local dog’s phantom pregnancy; the containment of domestic fowl; a potato blight. She notices that the local suspicion about incomers in general seems to be directed particularly in her case. What is clear is that she is being accused of wrongdoing, but in a language she cannot understand and so cannot address.

    And however diligently and silently she toils in service of the community, still she feels their hostility growing, pressing at the edges of her brother’s property. Inside the house, although she tends to her brother and his home with the utmost care and attention, he too begins to fall ill …

  • The Well of Saint Nobody

    The Well of Saint Nobody

    14.95

    William Barrow finds himself in lonely retirement in West Cork. Once an internationally renowned pianist, a terrible skin disease has attacked his hands and made it impossible for him to perform. Tara is a piano teacher with barely enough pupils to pay the month’s rent.

    In the local cafe, the elegant writing of a job advertisement catches her eye: ‘WANTED. HOUSEKEEPER.’ She begins to work in William’s house, keeping to herself the knowledge that they have met three times before, encounters that have changed her life. He is oblivious to this, while she spins tales of the well discovered in his back garden and of a mythical saint, of the healing powers of the water and the moss that surrounds it.

    But as the moss begins to heal William’s troubled hands, the lines between legend and reality begin to blur, secrets resurface, and past and present collide in unexpected ways.

    Gripping and lyrical, The Well of St Nobody is a marvellous new novel by the author of The Past, Night in Tunisia and Dream of a Beast.

  • Tom Lake

    Tom Lake

    16.95

    This is a story about Peter Duke who went on to be a famous actor. This is a story about falling in love with Peter Duke who wasn t famous at all. It s about falling so wildly in love with him the way one will at twenty-four that it felt like jumping off a roof at midnight. There was no way to foresee the mess it would come to in the end.

    It is spring and Lara s three grown daughters have returned to the family orchard. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the one story they ve always longed to hear of the film star with whom she shared a stage, and a romance, years before.

    Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents lead before their children are born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart.

  • 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.

  • The Trap

    The Trap

    14.95

    Stranded on a dark road in the middle of the night, a young woman accepts a lift from a passing stranger. It’s the nightmare scenario that every girl is warned about, and she knows the dangers all too well – but what other choice does she have?

    As they drive, she alternates between fear and relief – one moment thinking he is just a good man doing a good thing, the next convinced he’s a monster. But when he delivers her safely to her destination, she realizes her fears were unfounded.

    And her heart sinks.

    Because a monster is what she’s looking for.

    She’ll try again tomorrow night. But will the man who took her sister take the bait?