sellable

  • Kala

    Kala

    17.50

    In the seaside town of Kinlough, on Ireland’s west coast, three old friends are thrown together for the first time in years. They – Helen, Joe and Mush – were part of an original group of six inseparable teenagers in the summer of 2003, with motherless, reckless Kala Lanann as their group’s white-hot centre.

    Soon after that summer’s peak, Kala disappeared without a trace.

    Now it’s fifteen years later. Human remains have been discovered in the woods. Two more girls have gone missing.

    As past and present begin to collide, the estranged friends are forced to confront their own complicity in the events that led to Kala’s disappearance, and to try to stop Kinlough’s violent patterns repeating themselves once again …

    Against the backdrop of a town suffocating on its own secrets, in a story that builds from a smoulder to a stunning climax, Kala brilliantly examines the sometimes brutal costs of belonging, as well as the battle in the human heart between vengeance and forgiveness, despair and redemption.

  • Old Istanbul and Other Essays

    Old Istanbul and Other Essays

    22.00

    This is the first book of essays by a major new Irish non-fiction writer from the West of Ireland, comparable to the celebrated Kilkenny essayist Hubert Butler first published by The Lilliput Press and subsequently widely acclaimed. McCarthy’s writing is no less distinguished than Butler’s.

    Gerard McCarthy writes of the extraordinarily subtle mix of his essays: “Perhaps the Philosophers who had the most enduring influence on me were the contrary figures of Nietzsche and Marcus Aurelius. The reading of each was an antidote to the other, but I was drawn to both by an instinctive affinity. They were augmented subsequently by the gargantuan figure of Michel de Montaigne. My interest has continued to be in the region where Philosophy merges into Literature, with a preference for a language of metaphor rather than of abstract reasoning.”

    McCarthy continues: “These eight essays were written over the course of more than a decade. The fact that they have all been published in the one place, by the good offices of Irish Pages, has allowed me see the continuity between them, and to hope that they might be seen by the reader to form a unity.”

    ABOUT THE AUTHOR

    Gerard McCarthy (1949-2022) was born and reared in Dublin, and spent most of his adult life in Sligo, where he worked as social worker. He studied Philosophy at University College Dublin, with an early interest in Nietzsche and Marcus Aurelius, augmented subsequently by Michel de Montaigne. His first published essays – now collected here – have all appeared in issues of Irish Pages: A Journal of Contemporary Writing. He divided his time between his Sligo residence, an old schoolhouse on Collanmore Island in Clew Bay, and various travels to the Mediterranean and other peripheries of Europe. Old Istanbul & Other Essays was his first book.

  • The Wind Knows My Name

    The Wind Knows My Name

    17.50

    Vienna, 1938. Samuel Adler is five years old when his father disappears during Kristallnacht the night their family loses everything. As her child s safety seems ever harder to guarantee, Samuel s mother secures a spot for him on the last Kindertransport train out of Nazi-occupied Austria to England. He boards alone, carrying nothing but a change of clothes and his violin.

    Arizona, 2019. Eight decades later, Anita Diaz and her mother board another train, fleeing looming danger in El Salvador and seeking refuge in the United States. But their arrival coincides with the new family separation policy, and seven-year-old Anita finds herself alone at a camp in Nogales. She escapes her tenuous reality through her trips to Azabahar, a magical world of the imagination.

    Meanwhile, Selena Duran, a young social worker, enlists the help of a successful lawyer in hopes of tracking down Anita s mother. Intertwining past and present, The Wind Knows My Name tells the tale of these two unforgettable characters, both in search of family and home. It is both a testament to the sacrifices that parents make, and a love letter to the children who survive the most unfathomable dangers and never stop dreaming.

  • A Death in the Parish

    A Death in the Parish

    15.95

    THE SEQUEL TO THE NO. 1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER MURDER BEFORE EVENSONG

    CANON DANIEL CLEMENT IS BACK…

    It’s been a few months since murder tore apart the community of Champton apart. As Canon Daniel Clement tries to steady his flock, the parish is joined with Upper and Lower Badsaddle, bringing a new tide of unwanted change.

    But church politics soon become the least of Daniel’s problems. His mother – headstrong, fearless Audrey – is obviously up to something, something she is determined to keep from him. And she is not the only one.

    And then all hell breaks loose when murder returns to Champton in the form of a shocking ritualistic killing…

  • Adventures in Wonderland

    Adventures in Wonderland

    15.95

    Irishman Paul Charles is one of the leading music agents on the planet. Over the past 40 years, he has worked with some of the biggest names in music, at different times managing the careers of Van Morrison, Ray Davies of The Kinks, Gerry Rafferty, The Waterboys and Dexys Midnight Runners, and launching Tanita Tikaram – the teenage star whose debut album sold almost 5 million copies – into the world.

    In his role with the Asgard agency, he has also promoted shows featuring many of the leading artists in the world, including The Police, U2, Van Morrison, Dire Straits, Carole King, Meatloaf, David Gilmour, BB King, Emmylou Harris and John Lee Hooker.

    Paul has also been involved since the early days with Glastonbury Festival, with his artists topping the bill on more than one occasion before he was invited by Glastonbury founder Michael Eavis to take on the daunting – and inspiring – task of booking the Acoustic Stage at the festival every year, a role he has carried out for the past 30 years.

    Packed with jaw-dropping stories, including the time when he was almost burned alive along with his precious record collection, and pen pictures of the kind of stars we all want to know more about, Adventures In Wonderland is also one of the most complete insights into the world – and the business – of music that you will ever encounter. It is a must-read for every music fan – and for students of how the world of rock ’n’ roll works alike.

    Powerfully honest, often hilarious, frequently touching, and with wonderfully evocative photos, Adventures in Wonderland is a thoroughly joyous trip that will inspire readers to fall in love with music – whether for the first time or, better still, all over again…

  • Atlas The Story of Pa Salt

    Atlas The Story of Pa Salt

    15.95

    Spanning a lifetime of love and loss, crossing borders and oceans, Atlas: The Story of Pa Salt, co-authored by her son Harry Whittaker, draws Lucinda Riley’s saga to its stunning, unforgettable conclusion.

    1928, Paris. A boy is found, moments from death, and taken in by a kindly family. Gentle, precocious, talented, he flourishes in his new home, and the family show him a life he hadn’t dreamed possible. But he refuses to speak a word about who he really is.

    As he grows into a young man, falling in love and taking classes at the prestigious Conservatoire de Paris, he can almost forget the terrors of his past, or the promise he has vowed to keep. But across Europe an evil is rising, and no-one’s safety is certain. In his heart, he knows the time will come when he must flee once more.

    2008, the Aegean. The seven sisters are gathered together for the first time, on board the Titan, to say a final goodbye to the enigmatic father they loved so dearly.

    To the surprise of everyone, it is the missing sister who Pa Salt has chosen to entrust with the clue to their pasts. But for every truth revealed, another question emerges. The sisters must confront the idea that their adored father was someone they barely knew. And even more shockingly: that these long-buried secrets may still have consequences for them today.

    In this epic conclusion to the Seven Sisters series, everything will be revealed.

  • Everything's Fine

    Everything’s Fine

    16.95

    When Jess first meets Josh at their Ivy League college she dislikes him immediately: an entitled guy in chinos, ready to take over the world. Meanwhile Jess is almost always the only Black woman in their class. And Josh can’t accept that life might be easier for him because he’s white.

    After graduating, Jess and Josh end up working together in the same investment bank. As they lunch, spar and pick each other’s brains, Jess begins to see Josh in a different light.

    Soon, their tempestuous friendship turns into an electrifying romance that shocks them both, and Jess finds herself questioning who she really is and whether she’s willing to compromise that for love.

    Cecilia Rabess’ Everything’s Fine is an utterly original and deeply moving take on an age-old question from a dazzling new voice: what have you got to lose when you fall in love?

    Whip smart‘ KIRAN MILLWOOD HARGRAVE, author of The Mercies

    A subtle, ironic, wise state-of-the-nation novel‘ NICK HORNBY, author of High Fidelity

  • Demon Copperhead

    Demon Copperhead

    12.50

    Demon’s story begins with his traumatic birth to a single mother in a single-wide trailer, looking ‘like a little blue prizefighter.’ For the life ahead of him he would need all of that fighting spirit, along with buckets of charm, a quick wit, and some unexpected talents, legal and otherwise. In the southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, poverty isn’t an idea, it’s as natural as the grass grows. For a generation growing up in this world, at the heart of the modern opioid crisis, addiction isn’t an abstraction, it’s neighbours, parents, and friends.

    ‘Family’ could mean love, or reluctant foster care. For Demon, born on the wrong side of luck, the affection and safety he craves is as remote as the ocean he dreams of seeing one day. The wonder is in how far he’s willing to travel to try and get there.

    Suffused with truth, anger and compassion, Demon Copperhead is an epic tale of love, loss and everything in between.

  • A Bit of a Writer Brendan Behan's Collected Short Prose

    A Bit of a Writer Brendan Behan’s Collected Short Prose

    25.00

    Brendan Behan wrote over one hundred articles for Irish newspapers between 1951 and 1956 as he rose to international fame, with most of them written in a weekly column in the Irish Press. The articles reveal a serious writer capable of great comic set pieces and amusing yarns as well as thoughtful reflections on cultural and historical issues. They reflect his passion for working-class Dublin life and the history and folklore of the city, as well as his travels in Ireland and Europe.

    This edition gathers all the articles and essays that Behan published in newspapers from 1951 to his death in 1964. Selections of Behan’s articles have been published since his death (Hold Your Hour and Have Another, 1965; After the Wake, 1981; The Dubbalin Man, 1997). However, there has been no complete edition of Behan’s prose, and no edition has provided a detailed biographical and literary introduction, explanatory notes and suggestions for further reading.

    This volume is intended for publication during the centenary celebrations of Behan’s birth in 2023, with his birthday being 9 February.

  • The Moon Gate

    The Moon Gate

    17.50

    1939: On the eve of war, young English heiress Grace Grey travels from London to the wilderness of Tasmania.

    Coaxed out of her shell by the attentions of her Irish neighbour, Daniel – Grace finally learns to live. But when Australian forces are called to the frontline, and Daniel with them, he leaves behind a devastating secret which will forever bind them together.

    1975: Artist Willow Hawkins, and her new husband, Ben, can’t believe their luck when an anonymous benefactor leaves them a house on the remote Tasmanian coast. Confused and delighted, they set out to unmask Towerhurst’s previous owner – unwittingly altering the course of their lives.

    2004: Libby Andrews has always been sheltered from the truth behind her father Ben’s death.

    When she travels to London and discovers a faded photograph, a long-buried memory is unlocked, and she begins to follow an investigation that Ben could never complete. But will she realise that some secrets are best left buried . . .?

  • Limelight

    Limelight

    17.95

    Frankie has a love-hate relationship with the spotlight.

    She secretly craves attention, but she is ashamed of that craving. And after a lifetime of comparison to her perfect sister Bean, she has never felt more invisible. She only ever feels seen when she uploads risque photos to her small community of online fans.

    She creates a new her: confident, sexy and utterly unrecognisable from the real Frankie.

    Then the worst happens. Bean is diagnosed with cancer. While Frankie wants to fill the freezer with home cooked food, her mother decides she knows better and somehow launches a nationwide cancer fundraiser, with Frankie as the supportive-sister-spokesmodel.

    Inevitability, her account is found. Now everyone has their eyes on Frankie.

    With her family no longer speaking to her, Frankie flounders in her newfound notoriety. Feminists and misogynists rage at her online, while she attracts hundreds of new subscribers.

    Whether they’re demanding apologies or expecting an empowering call to arms, everyone wants Frankie to explain herself. But how can she explain what she barely understands?

  • I Will Be Good

    I Will Be Good

    18.50

    Meet Peig McManus, an unforgettable Dublin character whose story will make you laugh and cry. Her memoir of a 1940s’ childhood is recounted with candour and wit, as she describes her early years in the last of the city’s tenements, under the shadow of the Second World War. Even in the midst of sorrow, as the ravages of poverty and tuberculosis prevailed, there was always singing and laughter.

    Peig recalls happy family gatherings in their tenement rooms before their way of life was shattered when the slums were cleared, making way for the migration of inner-city families to Dublin’s new suburbs. Peig learned early about class distinction, chastity and shame, and fought against social prejudice to become one of Ireland’s foremost campaigners for educational reform. But a quiet sorrow lay at the heart of her life, one which could not be hidden forever.

    Now, in her eighties, Peig shares her story: an inspiring journey through the trials and triumphs of a remarkableIrish woman who refused to do what she was told.

  • Foreign Bodies

    Foreign Bodies

    19.95

    Cities and countries engulfed by panic and death, desperate for vaccines but fearful of what inoculation may bring. This is what the world has just gone through with Covid-19. But as Simon Schama shows in his epic history of vulnerable humanity caught between the terror of contagion and the ingenuity of science, it has happened before.

    Characteristically, with Schama the message is delivered through gripping, page-turning stories set in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: smallpox strikes London; cholera hits Paris; plague comes to India. Threading through the scenes of terror, suffering and hope – in hospitals and prisons, palaces and slums – are an unforgettable cast of characters: a philosopher-playwright burning up with smallpox in a country chateau; a vaccinating doctor paying house calls in Halifax; a woman doctor in south India driving her inoculator-carriage through the stricken streets as dead monkeys drop from the trees. But we are also in the labs when great, life-saving breakthroughs happen, in Paris, Hong Kong and Mumbai.

    At the heart of it all, an unsung hero: Waldemar Haffkine. A gun-toting Jewish student in Odesa turned microbiologist at the Pasteur Institute, hailed in England as ‘the saviour of mankind’ for vaccinating millions against cholera and bubonic plague in British India while being cold-shouldered by the medical establishment of the Raj. Creator of the world’s first mass production line of vaccines in Mumbai, he is tragically brought down in an act of shocking injustice.

    Foreign Bodies crosses borders between east and west, Asia and Europe, the worlds of rich and poor, politics and science. Its thrilling story carries with it the credo of its author on the interconnectedness of humanity and nature; of the powerful and the people. Ultimately, Schama says, as we face the challenges of our times together, ‘there are no foreigners, only familiars’.

  • 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

  • The Satsuma Complex

    The Satsuma Complex

    12.50

    ‘My name is Gary. I’m a thirty-year-old legal assistant with a firm of solicitors in London. To describe me as anonymous would be unfair but to notice me other than in passing would be a rarity.

    I did make a good connection with a girl, but that blew up in my face and smacked my arse with a fish slice.’

    Gary Thorn goes for a pint with a work acquaintance called Brendan. When Brendan leaves early, Gary meets a girl in the pub.

    He doesn’t catch her name, but falls for her anyway. When she suddenly disappears without saying goodbye, all Gary has to remember her by is the book she was reading: The Satsuma Complex. But when Brendan goes missing, Gary needs to track down the girl he now calls Satsuma to get some answers.

    And so begins Gary’s quest, through the estates and pie shops of South London, to finally bring some love and excitement into his unremarkable life.

    A page-turning story with a cast of unforgettable characters, The Satsuma Complex is the brilliantly funny smash hit first novel by bestselling author and comedian Bob Mortimer.

  • Next In Line

    Next In Line

    9.95

    London, 1988. Royal fever sweeps the nation as Britain falls in love with the ‘people’s princess’.

    Which means for Scotland Yard, the focus is on the elite Royalty Protection Command, and its commanding officer. Entrusted with protecting the most famous family on earth, they quite simply have to be the best. A weak link could spell disaster.

    Detective Chief Inspector William Warwick and his Scotland Yard squad are sent in to investigate the team. Maverick ex-undercover operative Ross Hogan is charged with a very sensitive – and unique – responsibility. But it soon becomes clear the problems in Royalty Protection are just the beginning.

    A renegade organization has the security of the country – and the Crown – in its sights. The only question is which target is next in line…