A Hymn of the Dawn

A Hymn of the Dawn tells of the life of the poet Padraic Fallon (1905-1974), his wife Don and their six sons during an idyllic summer in the south-east of Ireland in the 1950s. At Prospect, a Georgian house with a small farm, the poet writes his poems...

All for Hecuba: An Irish Theatrical Biography

From his days as a child actor in London, sharing the stage with Noel Coward, to founding the Gate Theatre in Dublin with his partner Hilton Edwards, and undertaking ambitious tours to pre-war Europe, Micheall MacLiammoir. All For Hecuba combines auto...

An Aran Keening

'McNeillie's prose can be as pristine and effervescent as the sea's edge on a summer beach. Sometimes it is loaded with biblical and Shakespearean fragments like Aran's winter tides glinting with torn bits of seaweed. So there is...

An Irish Sporting Life

'It is a long time since I have read a book of reminiscences as engaging'
- Tony O'Riordan, The Irish Times

Boss Croker

In 1846 the Crokers, a Presbyterian landlord family, flee famine-stricken West Cork aboard the Henry Clay, survive shipwreck and land in New York. There they are confronted with the grim realities of the teeming city - poverty, prostitution, and stree...

Breakfast the Night Before
Recollections of an Irish Horse Dealer

This sparkling memoir gives a personal view of Irish rural life from the Economic War of the 1930s to the farming boom and recession of the 1970s. It describes the upbringing of a Protestant only child on a farm near Nenagh in north Tipperary-a...

Bright Bewildering Green

'A story remarkable because commonplace in rural Ireland - the surplus child, the tragedy of the extra mouth.'
- from the Foreword by John Stalker

'A heartening, eloquent but dispassionate testimony to the triumph of determ...

Broken Landscapes: Selected Letters of Ernie O'Malley 1924-1957

Ernie O'Malley was a revolutionary republican and writer. One of the leading figures in the Irish independence and civil wars, he survived wounds, imprisonment and hunger stirke, before going to the USA in 1928 to fundraise on de Valera's beha...

Cadenus & Swift's Most Valuable Friend (HB)

These books are being reissued as they appeared in the first Dolmen Press editions in one composite volume, with an invaluable, contextual introduction by eighteenth-century Swift scholar Andrew Carpenter. He assesses the reaction of Swift's serious biogra...

Cathal Gannon: The Life and Times of a Dublin Craftsman 1910-1999

Cathal Gannon (1910-1999) revived the art of harpsichord making in Dublin in the early 1950s after a lull of some 150 years. His story is one not of rags to riches but of obscurity to recognition. Despite a modest start in life, he became hugely respected ...

Century of Endeavour: A Biographical and Autobiographical View of the Twentieth Century in Ireland

“In this richly documented exploration of his own public life and that of his father, Roy Johnston provides us with a unique opportunity to follow the intellectual odyssey of a singularly gifted family, from the Board Room of Trinity College Dublin i...

Charles: The Life and World of Charles Acton

This is a biography of the music critic and commentator, chronicling his family's history over 300 years at Kilmacurragh in County Wicklow (now a celebrated arboretum in the care of the State), and his work for the Irish Times over thirty years (1...

Come Dance With Me - A Memoir 1898-1956

Ninette de Valois, the world-famous prima ballerina, was born Edris Stannus in 1898 and raised at Baltiboys in County Wicklow. In this autobiography, first published in 1957 and now appearing in a new paperback edition, she writ...

Confessions of a Poacher

In 1889 Jim Connell wrote 'The Red Flag', which became the anthem of the international Labour movement. He was born near Kilskyre, County Meath, and in his teens moved with his family to Birr, County Offaly, where his family worked as a groom for the Earl ...

Dead as Doornails

'A classic; of his mastery of language there can be no doubt'
- Anthony Burgess

This p...

Denis Johnston: A Life

'This excellent biography will undoubtedly stimulate further interest in the work while providing fitting tribute to a remarkable Irishman.' - P.J. Mathews, Irish Times

'Bernard Adams has produced a terrific biography of a truculent maverick.' - Neil D...

Desmond Leslie (1921-2001); The Biography of an Irish Gentleman

When a guidebook to Ireland described his family as being ‘mildly eccentric', Desmond Leslie took offence and wrote to the publishers informing them that, on the contrary, the Leslies were very eccentric. Son of writer Sir Shane Leslie and brother o...

Dublin Made Me

Dublin Made Me, the first of C.S. ('Todd') Andrews' two celebrated volumes of autobiography, describes in loving detail the pre-independence Dublin in which the author grew up and provides a vivid participant's account of the Wa...

Gander at the Gate

"The poet W.B. yeats desired to produce written work that, while it had been arduously crafted, would appear as immediate and spontaneous as the ordinary spoken words of people. It is a testament to the achievment of Rory O'Connor that he has...

Hazel: A Life of Lady Lavery

Until now Lady Lavery has been remembered for the numerous portraits by her husband, the painter John Lavery, celebrated in "The Municipal Gallery Re-visited' by W.B. Yeats, This first biography of Hazel tells the story the pictures cannot: o...

Hugh Lane 1875-1915

This is the first full life of the art dealer and patron Hugh Lane since the rather adoring 1920 biography by his aunt Lady Gregory. Robert O'Byrne makes use of the vast quantities of archival material that have come to light in recent decades to construct...

Humanity Dick Martin 'King of Connemara' 1754-1834

This finely detailed and amply illustrated biography recreates the life and times of one of Ireland's earliest environmentalists, founder of the world movement for the protection of animals. A loveable Galwayman, Volunteer colonel, landlord-eccent...

In Ruin Reconciled

In Ruin Reconciled, A Memoir of Anglo-Ireland 1913-1959 (t'hat country of the mind'), tells the story of an orphan girl adopted by Anglo-Irish parents and brought to live in the Big House of Curragh Chase, Adare, Co. Limerick. Her solitary chi...

Intimacy With Strangers: A Life of Brief Encounters

Intimacy with Strangers offers a dazzlingly original, thought-provoking approach to celebrity interviewing. Ciaran Carty draws upon a career involving many of the world’s leading writers, artists, actors and directors as they explore in...

Irish Eccentrics: A Selection

Ireland's history has long been illuminated, and enlivened, by bizarre, colourful, extravagant, unfettered individuals: ripe country-house eccentrics, saints, scholars, bucks and hell-rakes, duellists, abductors, rhymers and miracle-makers. These ...

Lives Less Ordinary: Thirty-Two Irish Portraits

The people who talk about their lives in this book represent a creative, dissident Ireland. They are artists, writers, map-makers, weavers, water-diviners, teachers, environmentalists, farmers, wood-cutters, gardeners, travellers and monks. Some conti...

Man of No Property

'In the spring of 1924 I was released from internment where I had been held for a year since the end of the Civil War in what was then the Irish Free State. I was a little over twenty-two years of age.'
So begins this extraordinary memo...

McDowell on McDowell: A Memoir

Between clubs, dining halls, libraries, institutions and good addresses in the country, R.B. McDowell, born in September 1913, had led the charmed and energized existence of a distinguished bachelor don, embellishing the lives of generations of studen...

Memoirs of a Wild Goose

Highly personal memoirs by Irish diplomats are rare, and those with the quality of fictional autobiography by George Moore, Brendan Behan and Francis Stuart are rarer still. These remarkable reminisces of a man who served his country in Germany and It...

Mirror, Mirror: Confessions of a Plastic Surgery Addict

Terry Prone once thought plastic surgery was for the vain, the self-regarding and the rich. She thought herself the person least likely to submit to the plastic surgeon's scalpel.

But this was before a traumatic car crash in which the ste...

Oliver MacDonagh 1924-2002

This book is a selection of historian Oliver MacDonagh's writings edited and introduced by his former student, Tom Dunne, who contibutes an account of MacDonagh's career and a bibliography. It brings together a series of childhood memories of a bank manage...

Parnell: A Memoir

Charles Stewart Parnell (1846-91), the greatest Irish politican of the late nineteenth century, forfeited leadership of the Irish Party in Westminster because of a divorce scandal, after a decade in which he had placed the Irish Question at the centre...

Promises to Keep

John and Geraldine Gleeson, teenage sweethearts in Carlow, had only one wish in life after they got married: to have a child.

Promises to Keep is John Gleeon's heartrending account of this couple's quest to conceive, of the serious physical dama...

Remembering How We Stood

With a foreword by J.P. Donleavy

The best book about literary Dublin ever written' - FRANK DELANEY

Edna O'Brien chose John Ryan's memoirs as her Observer Book of the Year in 1975, describing it as a fine and loving accoun...

Revolutionary Imperialist. William Smith O'Brien 1803-1864

Published in Australia by: Crossing Press, P.O. Box 1137, Darlinghurst, N.S.W. 2010
By 1848 all peaceful means of giving Ireland an equal place within the British Empire seemed ...

Running the Rapids: A Writer's Life

Poet, travel writer, teacher, film-extra in Laurence Olivier's Hamlet, quiz-show panellist -Kildare Dobbs has played many parts, been many places, met many people. His life's journey, marked by frequent detours and diversions, from Asia to old Europe, Afri...

Seventy Years Young: Memories of Elizabeth, Countess of Fingall

REPRINT NOW AVAILABLE

'This book is one of the most remarkable and the most entertaining of its kind ever published about late Victorian and Edwardian Ireland.'
- Peter Costello, Sunday Independent

'A woman of cons...

Shane Leslie: Sublime Failure

Shane Leslie (1885-1971) - diplomat; man of letters (novelist, biographer, poet, historian, pamphleteer); Irish, Anglo-Irish and half-American aristocrat; religious devotee; first cousin of Winston Churchill, Irish nationalist, British subject. Using n...

Signe Toksvig's Irish Diaries 1926-1937

'Superb - These diaries are a challenging blend of lyricism, loneliness and the telling detail. Toksvig emerges as a passionate, generous and gifted writer.'
- Brendan Fleming, Iris...

Skeff: A Life of Owen Sheehy Skeffington 1909-1970

Owen Sheehy Skeffington was one of the few Irish public figures who carried a flame for individual conscience and humanitarianism during the mid century. He came from a socialist-repub...

Skelligs Calling

Out of print 'Michael Kirby is a man who understands the true value of life. He shows us in this marvellous book that everything that lives is connected ... his is the view of the wise man: we have much to learn from him.' - Jane Urquhart

'Kir...

Skelligs Sunset

'A man who understands the true value of life ... he shows us that everything that lives is connected.' - Jane Urquhart

'He writes charmingly with colour, fun and a flair few others have ever bettered.' - Sunday Tribune

Skelligside

This is the remarkable folk autobiography of a small famer, fisherman and poet from from the South Iveragh peninsula of Co. Kerry, part of Ireland's western sea-board, a region bounded by mountains and unique inits cultural inheritance.

K...

Solitary and Wild: Frederick MacNeice and the Salvation of Ireland

For lovers of the often dark and troubled poetry of Louis MacNeice, his father is a reassuring presence: solid, sober, pious yet tolerant, a Church of Ireland clergyman who was not afraid to reject the Ulster Covenant of 191...

Something to Hide: The Life of Sheila Wingfield, Viscountess Powerscourt

'A riveting portrait of a gifted poet - a contentious woman and the gilded worlds she moved in, yet never belonged to' EDNA O'BRIEN

A fascinating portrait of a neglected poet and memoirist whose colourful and complicated life brought her into contact w...

Technical Virgins

In her best-selling first volume of autobiography, Cowslips and Chainies, Elaine Crowley remembered her childhood in 1930s Dublin with great warmth and poignance. In this delightful se...

The Beat: Life on the Streets

Who are the women who walk the beat in Dublin's red-light districts?

How did they get there?

Why do they stay?

What happens when they try to leave?

What are their lives really like?

The Beat: Life on th...

The Burning of Brinsley MacNamara

The Valley of the Squinting Windows (1918), Brinsley MacNamara's first published novel, so enraged the Westmeath community in which he lived that the book was publicly burned, its ...

The Dubliner Diaries

'If I was to urge you to buy one book for Christmas, this would be it; an ideal present.' Eamon Delaney. Read the whole article here<...

The Early Years of Brian O'Nolan

Ciaran O Nuallain's memoir of his brother Brian O'Nolan (1991-66), the only major source on the early life of the man who later achieved literary fame as Flann O'Brien and Mylan na gCopaleen, appears here for the first time in English.

The Elephant and the Polish Question

'Our finest living essayist. Maurice Craig's exquisite collection... is at once literary, erudite and mechanical: poppet-valves and cams, Yeats's inability to spell, bookbi...

The Family Business

'Another first in my life: at the age of thirty-one I brought a girlfriend home. Kathleen sat on the chaise longue, small legs crossed, one tiny toe resting on my mother's lime-green pouffe, her petite nose wrinkling with distaste as she looke...

The Fun Palace: An Autobiography

Agnes Bernelle, one of Ireland's best-loved stage performers, was born Agnes Bernauer in Berlin in 1923, the daughter of a renowned Jewish-Hungarian theatre impresario. In this sparkling, intimate memoir she recounts her early years in Germany, her fami...

The Irish Donkey

The donkey is an integral part of the Irish landscape and tradition. This new, enlarged edition of a book originally published in 1969 traces the evolution of the species from its origins in Africa and central Asia to its arrival in Ireland in the early me...

The Junior Dean RB McDowell

Dr RB McDowell is a legend. To graduates of Trinity College, Dublin, he is a symbol of their years at university, the enduring source of endless amusing anecdotes and memories.

Now, for the first time, reminiscences by graduates and friends, recording ...

The Memoirs of Mrs Leeson, Madam 1727-1797

'The charm of this book lies in its peep-show perspective on Dublin public life in the latter part of the 18th century.'
- David Nokes, The Sunday Times

'A vastly entertaining and colourful memoir... The book offers a treme...

The Songman

'With a Fenian fiddle in one ear and an Orange drum in the other', singer Tommy Sands was reared in the foothills of the Mourne mountains, where he still lives. As a child, he was immersed in folk music - his father played the fiddle, his moth...

The Village of Longing

'Page after page, he splits the atom of detail so that autobiography and cultural history flare up in one long pleasurable chain-reaction.'-Seamus Heaney, Observer

The Village of Longing, George O'Brien's narrative of his chil...

The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste, 1904 -1920

Winner of the Premio Commisso in Italy for Best Biography 2004.

Since the publication of Richard Ellmann's James Joyce in 1959, Joyce has received remarkably little biographical attention. Scholars have chipped away at various aspects of Ellmann's glitt...

Throttle Full Open: A Life of Lady Bailey, Irish Aviatrix

ONLY AVAILABLE IN EBOOK FORMAT

'I have felt the need for a change of scene and interest lately.'
-Lady Bailey on the eve of her London-Cape Town flight, March 1928.

Mary Westenra, born in 1890, was the daughter of Derr...

Vintage Nell: The McCafferty Reader

'Contraception, abortion, divorce, gay rights, the war with Britain. The fire has burned out, the smoke is drifting away, and we begin to see clearly now. When the next millennium comes the landscape for the young will have vastly changed … Forward ...

Voices from a Journal

Foreword by Brendan Kennelly

This is a writer's journal of his friendships, encounters and observations during the 1950s and 60s, describing relationships with Cork author Frank O'Connor, Patrick Kavanagh, Charles Cape (onetime governor of Strange...

W.E.H. Lecky, Historian & Politician 1838 - 1903

Readership: Irish history, politics, biography, Victorian studies This is the long-awaited biography of the great humanist historian of eighteenth-century Ireland. Carlow landlord, w...

Watching the Door: A Memoir 1971-1978

As an Irish Catholic raised in Leicester, fresh from University College Dublin with a first in History, Kevin Myers is sent north to work for the Belfast bureau of RTE News. There he covers the increasingly vicious conflict erupting in the city as the...

Wicked Little Joe

In the summer of 1939, as a two-year-old in London, I was given away by my parents to a Chelsea friend and taken on the Irish Mail to Dublin.

Thus begins this extraordinary memoir by travel writer and novelist Joseph Hone, one of eight childr...

William Francis Butler: A Life

'Martin Ryan's splendid biography of Butler shows how the rapidly expanding empire offered men of a certain class unprecedented opportunities for adventure, travel and intrigue ... If Emerson is right in his observation that "there is no history, only biog...

William Watts: A Memoir

It is surprising that this is the first autobiography by a former Provost of Trinity College Dublin since it was founded in 1592. William Watts was elected Provost in 1981 and served his ten year term until 1991.

This was a period of extraordinary dev...

With Barry Flanagan: Travels Through Time and Spain

With Barry Flanagan is a vivid account of a friendship that evolved into a working relationship when Richard McNeff became ‘spontaneous fixer’ (Flanagan’s description) of the sculptor’s show held in June 1992 at the Mu...