Showing 1–16 of 28 resultsSorted by popularity
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€17.95
Description
From the author of the hugely successful book Legendary Ireland, The Turning of the Year explores the Celtic division of the year, from Samhain to Imbolc, to Bealtaine, to Lunasa, back to Samhain. It examines the significance of particular times of the year and features re-tellings of various legends associated with them. The book will look at the close connection of the Irish with the land and with nature, bringing us on an exhilarating journey through the Irish seasons and the customs that welcomed each one in turn.
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€50.00
The Tide is Coming – a book of Coney Island in Sligo Bay by Maura Gilligan –
is a beautiful limited-edition publication containing prose, poetry, interviews, photographs
and artwork.
As the title of this book suggests, the rhythm of the tides has, for centuries, dictated the
rhythm of life on Coney Island. During his lifetime, Islander John McGowan called out the
warning “the tide is coming” countless times, ensuring that visitors would cross the causeway
safely before channels at either side closed the strand passage and made an island of his
shores.
This little island is said to have given its name to Coney Island in New York! Its ancient
name, Inismulclohy, can be found in maps, records and annals.
Contents
Insightful poetry and prose reflect the author’s thoughts as she moves across the Island in
space and time.
Author-transcribed interviews with Island elder John McGowan form an integral part of this
book, illuminating eight decades of life in a place inhabited by John’s ancestors since 1789.
There are echoes here of life on other offshore Irish islands, now uninhabited.
Photographer James Fraher’s haunting black and white images, together with Catherine
Fanning’s remarkable paintings, prints and line drawings, add visual depth and magic.
Special Features
The book itself is a work of art; a striking hardback cover collage is enhanced by timeless
quarter binding, head and tail bands, marker ribbon and rich-coloured endpapers. Sumptuous
Munken paper provides the perfect backdrop for superb illustrations and exceptional writing.
Folded within the pages of this book is a surprise – an A3 loose-leaf ‘Map of Coney Island in
Sligo Bay’, which can be framed. Created from an old and fragile line-drawn original, the
current version of this map illustrates locations on and around the Island, some of which still
carry their original Irish names.
The Tide is Coming is a wonderful history of an Irish island and a perfect gift.
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€12.50
* LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2023 *
* WINNER OF THE AN POST IRISH BOOK AWARDS NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2022 *
* SHORTLISTED FOR BRITISH BOOK OF THE YEAR: DEBUT FICTION *
* SHORTLISTED FOR THE WATERSTONES DEBUT FICTION PRIZE 2022 *
* AN OBSERVER BEST DEBUT NOVELIST OF 2022 *
* A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK AT BEDTIME *
One by one, she undid each event, each decision, each choice. If Davy had remembered to put on a coat. If Seamie McGeown had not found himself alone on a dark street.
If Michael Agnew had not walked through the door of the pub on a quiet night in February in his white shirt. There is nothing special about the day Cushla meets Michael, a married man from Belfast, in the pub owned by her family. But here, love is never far from violence, and this encounter will change both of their lives forever.
As people get up each morning and go to work, school, church or the pub, the daily news rolls in of another car bomb exploded, another man beaten, killed or left for dead. In the class Cushla teaches, the vocabulary of seven-year-old children now includes phrases like ‘petrol bomb’ and ‘rubber bullets’. And as she is forced to tread lines she never thought she would cross, tensions in the town are escalating, threatening to destroy all she is working to hold together.
Tender and shocking, Trespasses is an unforgettable debut of people trying to live ordinary lives in extraordinary times.
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€60.00
Available Now
Featuring essays from:
Mary Gilmartin, Martin Timoney, Noel McCarthy, Carleton Jones, John Waddell, Rachel Moss and Tamyln McHugh, Kieran O’Connor, Yvonne McDermott, Nollaig Ó’Muraíle, Jack Johnston, Brendan Scott, Pádraig Lenihan, Conchubar Ó Crualaoich, David A. Fleming, David Dickson, Ciarán Mac Murchaidh, Tom Bartlett, Marie Boran and Brigid Clesham, Perry McIntyre and Richard Reid, Gerard Moran, Thomas Power, Jonathan Cherry, Fiona Gallagher, Aideen Ireland, Miriam Moffitt, Mary Timoney, R.F. Foster, Charles Travis, Gregory Daly, Patrick E. O’Brien, Michael Farry, Anne O’Dowd, Proinnsias Breathnach, and Mary Cawley.
Further information coming soon.
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€24.00
Description
Dancer Edwina Guckian celebrates the folk traditions and calendar customs of the Ireland in which she grew up in rural County Leitrim.
As a child Edwina’s Grandfather brought her to House Dances where he played the fiddle and she watched dancers in hobnail boots ‘knock sparks from the flagstones’ on traditional cottage stone floors. Half-doors were taken down from their hinges to dance on when the floors were rough or uneven.
Edwina too became ‘a great one for knocking sparks’ from the flagstones with her own dancing. Here she brings to life for readers of all ages the lovely colourful customs, fun and enchantments of her childhood. Dressing up for Halloween, Wren Day and Brigid’s Day, going to communal bonfires at the crossroads, remembering the harvest ‘meitheal’ and hilltop berry picking on Bilberry Sunday.
Edwina vividly brings to life a world of Strawboys, Mummers and Biddy Boys, Crossroads Dances, Cake Dances, Nollaig na mBan feasts, Easter treats and many more year round Irish folk traditions.
Join Edwina as she dances through the Celtic Calendar Year and the importance of ancient Quarter Day customs and old-world Fire Festival traditions at Samhain, Imbolc, Bealtaine and Lughnasa. Every page of Sparks from the Flagstones is joyfully illustrated by Connemara-based artist Andrea Rossi.
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€22.95
Description
Our ancestors developed a uniquely nature-focused society, centred on esteemed poets, seers, monks, healers and wise women who were deeply connected to the land. They used this connection to the cycles of the natural world – from which we are increasingly dissociated – as an animating force in their lives. In this illuminating new book, Manchan Magan sets out on a journey, through bogs, across rivers and over mountains, to trace these ancestor’s footsteps.
He uncovers the ancient myths that have shaped our national identity and are embedded in the strata of land that have endured through millennia – from ice ages through to famines and floods. Here, the River Shannon is a goddess, and trees and their life-sustaining root systems are hallowed. See the world in a new light in this magical exploration into the life-sustaining wisdom of what lies beneath us.
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€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.
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€50.00
Sligo offers a unique setting for a study of the Great Famine and the book investigates the period from the first appearance of the blight to the immediate aftermath. The shifting, inept and often heartless government policies reflected different attitudes to famine relief and this impacted on the people in a very direct and often catastrophic way.
Sligo experienced considerable death and emigration in the years from 1845 to 1852; the second worst affected county in the country after Mayo, losing a third of its population in just a few short years. The reaction of local landlords and landholders to the suffering was also varied and the study explored the lengths to which the Famine offered an opportunity to some landlords to impose long-term policies on their estates.
Padraig Deignan has previously published ‘The Protestant Community in Sligo, 1914-49’ in 2010, ‘Land and People in Nineteenth Century Sligo: from Union to Local Government’ in 2015 and ‘Sligo in the Eighteenth Century’ in 2021.
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€15.95
From the author of the multimillion-copy bestseller Normal People, an exquisitely moving story about grief, love and family. Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common. Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties – successful, competent and apparently unassailable.
But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women – his enduring first love Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke. Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother.
Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined. For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude – a period of desire, despair and possibility – a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.
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€25.00
In this richly illustrated journey, Manchán Magan traces the forgotten presence of the Irish in Iceland; monks and migrants, storytellers and shapeshifters who helped shape a land we’ve long imagined as purely Norse.
Through language, lore, place names, DNA, and landscape, Magan uncovers the traces of Gaelic life woven through Iceland’s sagas and stones. With curiosity and care, this book reveals how two island nations, once deeply connected, share more than we’ve been taught to remember. Ireland in Iceland offers a new perspective on ancestry, belonging, and the lasting traces of culture carried across oceans.
Ireland in Iceland is the second in a series of illustrated books Manchán is publishing with Mayo Books Press, exploring cultural similarities and resonances between Ireland, India, Iceland, and the Aboriginal cultures of Australia. Ireland in Iceland is illustrated by Aodh Ó Riagáin/ Oreganillo.
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€15.95
The brand-new novel from million-copy bestseller and national treasure Graham Norton – a dazzling, decades-sweeping story about love, bravery and what it means to live a significant life.
Always on the periphery, looking on, young Frankie Howe was never quite sure enough of herself to take centre stage – after all, life had already judged her harshly. Now old, Frankie finds it easier to forget the life that came before. Then Damian, a young Irish carer, arrives at her London flat, there to keep an eye on her as she recovers from a fall.
A memory is sparked, and the past crackles into life as Damian listens to the story Frankie has kept stored away all these years. Travelling from post-war Ireland to 1960s New York – a city full of art, larger than life characters and turmoil – Frankie shares a world in which friendship and chance encounters collide. A place where, for a while, life blazes with an intensity that can’t last but will perhaps live on in other ways and in other people.
But as Frankie’s past slowly emerges, her spirit and endurance are revealed as undeniable . . .
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€31.95
Ireland is a strikingly different country now to the one it was in the mid-1990s. Dramatic economic, social and cultural changes, including the Celtic Tiger boom and increasingly secular debate about abortion, the status of women and same-sex marriage underlined the scale of the transformation. The new diversity of the population and literary and musical prowess also revealed a country experiencing rapid alteration.
The road to peace – that saw an end to war in Northern Ireland and culminated in the first visit to southern Ireland of a reigning British monarch in 100 years – illuminated the new Anglo-Irish dynamic. Explosive revelations about deep betrayals from the past destroyed the credibility of the traditionally powerful Catholic Church. And in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, Ireland rebounded and rebuilt to great success, but remained plagued by health and housing failures.
Economic recovery, the end of civil war politics, ever closer European involvement and Anglo-Irish highs were followed by Brexit lows and increasing talk of Irish unity. There is much to open people’s eyes in this riveting account of contemporary Ireland. As the Republic enters its second century of independence, and the North continues to grapple with the legacy of the Troubles, Diarmaid Ferriter makes historical sense of post-1990s Ireland, and what lies in the darkest corners of its archives.
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€21.95
Description
#1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER · #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER‘One day you’ll look back and realise how hard it was, and just how well you did’Charlie Mackesy’s four unlikely friends are wandering through the wilds again. They’re not sure what they are looking for. They do know that life can be difficult, but that they love each other, and cake is often the answer.
When the dark clouds come, can the boy remember what he needs to get through the storm?The hugely anticipated new book from Charlie Mackesy, revisiting the much-loved world of The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse – the bestselling adult non-fiction book of all time, with over ten million readers around the world.
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€10.95
Manchán Magan is fascinated by words, particularly Irish words, and their connections to the natural world. Having enjoyed great success with the bestselling Tree Dogs, Banshee Fingers and Other Irish Words for Nature, he now brings his infectious wonder and enthusiasm for the Irish language to an even younger audience with this board book featuring simple translations for favourite animals, birds, fish and insects. The accompanying stunning black-line illustrations will transfix even the littlest reader.
Teach your little one a cúpla focail from the get-go.
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€24.95
After first emerging in the 1920s, ladies Gaelic football was soon sidelined; breathless women chasing after a football was just too unladylike for the powers that be. Despite this resistance, the sport became a popular novelty act at local carnivals. And when the Ladies GaelicFootball Association (LGFA) was founded in Tipperary in July 1974, fifty years of extraordinary growth were set in motion.
From writing the rule book to a membership of nearly 200,000, the earliest All-Stars to game-changing partnerships, this definitive history captures that unstoppable journey to becoming a national sport and so much more. Lavishly illustrated and drawing from national, club and personal archives, UNLADYLIKE is for the players, the fans, the kit-washers, the sandwich-makers and the supporters alike, and confirms the best is yet to come.
