The children of Rosaleen Madigan leave the west of Ireland for lives they never could have imagined in Dublin, New York and various third-world towns. In her early old age their difficult, wonderful mother announces that she's decided to sell the house and divide the proceeds. Her adult children come back for a last Christmas, with the feeling that their childhoods are being erased, their personal history bought and sold. A darkly glinting novel set...

Elizabeth Keane returns to Ireland after her mother's death, intent only on wrapping up that dismal part of her life. There is nothing here for her; she wonders if there ever was. The house of her childhood is stuffed full of useless things, her mother's presence already fading. And perhaps, had she not found the small stash of letters, the truth would never have come to light. 40 years earlier, a young woman stumbles from a remote stone house, the...

Connell and Marianne grow up in the same small town in the west of Ireland, but the similarities end there. In school, Connell is popular and well-liked, while Marianne is a loner. But when the two strike up a conversation - awkward but electrifying - something life-changing begins. Normal People is a story of mutual fascination, friendship and love. It takes us from that first conversation to the years beyond, in the company of two people who try...

Cyril Avery is not a real Avery - or at least that's what his adoptive parents tell him. And he never will be. But if he isn't a real Avery, then who is he? Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple via the intervention of a hunchbacked Redemptorist nun, Cyril is adrift in the world, anchored only tenuously by his heartfelt friendship with the infinitely more...

In an Irish graveyard, the corpses are distracted by local jealousies and petty disputes assuming global importance. Their banter is full of news of above-ground happenings, received from the recently arrived. As we listen in on the gossip, rumors, backbiting, complaining, and obsessing of the local community, we learn that in the afterlife the same old life goes on beneath the sod.-- Source other than library of Congress.

For the past two decades, you could cross the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic half a dozen times without noticing or, indeed, without turning off the road you were travelling. It cuts through fields, winds back-and-forth across roads, and wends from the mouth of the Newry River to the mouth of the Foyle. It's frictionless - a feat sealed by the Good Friday Agreement. Before that, watchtowers loomed over border communities, military...

This is Edna O'Brien's stunning novel about the uniquely wonderful, terrible, peculiar place she once called home. She writes not only of a life there - of a child becoming a woman - but of the Irish experience out of which that life arises. This is the Ireland of country villages and barley fields, of druids in the woods and of mischievous girls. Ireland has marked her life and work with unmistakable colour and depth, and here she recreates her homeland...

Two men meet for a pint - or two - in a Dublin pub. They chew the fat, set the world to rights, curse the ref, say a last farewell. In this second collection of delicious comic dialogues Doyle's drinkers ponder: a topless Kate Middleton, Barack and Michelle Obama, David Beckham, Jimmy Savile, the financial crisis (again), abortion (again), and horsemeat in your burger.

Melody Shee is alone and in trouble. Her husband doesn't take her news too well. She doesn't want to tell her father yet because he's a good man and this could break him. She's trying to stay in the moment, but the future is looming - larger by the day - while the past won't let her go. What she did to Breedie Flynn all those years ago still haunts her. It's a good thing that she meets Mary Crothery when she does. Mary is a young Traveller woman,...