A Close Shave with the Devil

"The devil was going around again and everyone knew because it was in the papers. An usherette in the Metropole saw him at An Apartment for Peggie, eating oranges in a brown trilby; two women in Clery's Bargain Basement came upon him fingerin...

A Night in the Catacombs

In this gathering of ten stories, beginning and ending over Dublin's River Poddle, David M Kiely merges history with fiction to illuminate mysteries that have baffled literary scholars for generations. Could the interlocutor in Minot's Tower r...

A Night in the Catacombs - Fictional Portraits of Ireland's Literati

In this collection of ten stories, David M. Kiely merges history with fiction to illuminate mysteries that have baffled scholars for generations. What was the precise nature of Dean Swift's dementia? What odd adventures befell Goldsmith on his Eur...

A State of Mind

In mid-1970s rural Wicklow, John Hughes, a once-feted journalist/author with writer's block, reflects on recent events. When English author William Cromer and his German lover Ingrid move to the Old Rectory nearby, their lives are transformed and ...

Beauty in a Broken Place (HB)

In Colm Toibin's debut play, Beauty in a Broken Place, Sean O'Casey recalls the people and events surrounding the 1926 premiere of his controversial drama The Plough and the Stars. Toibin's unusual and provocative memory play manages to be...

Before The House Burns

"Electric, real, utterly modern: this is a voice to welcome and to watch" - Anne Enright.

Set on Ireland's Atlantic coast, Before the House Burns is a tender, implosive first novel by an award-winning short story writer and poet...

Belios

'Belios is a dark, rough, funny novel about a dying genius and his crazed biographer. It rages with a wild vitality oddly touched by tenderness. Órfhlaith Foyle has fire in her belly.' - Patrick McGrath, author of Dr. Haggard's Disease

Narrator ...

Belmont Castle, or Suffering Sensibility

Among the possessions seized from Theobald Wolfe Tone upon his arrest in 1798 were two copies of Belmont Castle, the epistolary novel he wrote and published with his friends Richard Jebb and John Radcliffe in 1790. Much more than a mere youthful liter...

Berkeley's Telephone and Other Fictions

'I am a philosopher. But let me qualify that at once. I qualified in philosophy, a long time ago, in the city of Dublin, among spoiled priests, a diplomat's daughter in jodhpurs, two would-be businessmen and the son ofa drunken commissioner of oaths. And, ...

Big in Japan

'An uproariously funny account of what it's like to become a star in the music world!' Louis Walsh

When pop Svengali Max of Big In Japan Records discovers Cara in a shop in Temple Bar, he immediately signs her up to his stable of ...

Bird in the Snow

Bird in the Snow follows twenty-four hours in the life of Birdie Waters.

On the eve of burying her only son, she stays awake all night, examining old photographs, cherishing memories of Gussie and her beloved late husband, Alex - a vet who ma...

Death of a King & Other Stories

'A writer of genius.' - Samuel Beckett

A gypsy king dies, and a group of villagers seek to save him from the dishonour of a pauper's grave. The dispute over the inheritance of a well-field becomes a struggle between the 'old stock' and the 'new people'...

Dispatching Baudelaire

'Baudelaire had written that man selects his prey, then becomes anxious and impatient for the kill...'

Throughout his life accountant Mike Shaw has played it safe, kept his head down, and avoided risk. His girlfriend Brenda is a secretary. Their idea o...

Dubliners

Dubliners, one of the great short-story collections in the English language, was first published in London on 15 June 1914 by Grant Richards, who had rejected the original set of twelve stories in September 1906; in the interim, according to Joyce, it...

Foley's Asia

'The unlikely world of monumental sculpture opens up an incredibly varied series of tableaux in Foley's Asia. A meditation on arms, oppression and empire, it offers a unique insight into Irish and Indian colonial experience.' - Neil Jordan<...

Forensic Songs

In his second collection of short stories, Mike McCormack joins head and heart in a series of tales which weave a fluid vision of a world morphing between the real and the hyperr...

G.A.A.Y

'The G.A.A is the Gaelic Athletic Association. G.A.Y. is a club night at the London Astoria. Both are full of sweaty men.'

'You've got to fight to be fabulous.'

Anto Broderick is young, cute and wants to be a pop star. But he's cursed with parents ...

Goodbye Again

Ben Contini, a disenchanted painter of considerable talent, has just buried his mother. Rifling through the attic of her Kilkenny house he stumbles across a Modigliani nude, worth millions. Determined to learn the provenance of the painting, he and El...

In the Season of the Daisies

The story of Seanie Doolin, surviving twin of a brutal civil-war murder in the Irish midlands, forms the core of this extraordinary debut novel. In 1948 the Town, shadowed by its buried past, prepares for a visit from de Valera and President O'Kel...

Is That All There Is?

James Joyce's Finnegans Wake: A Reading by Patrick Healy

'Amazing and important, Healy is something truly rare - this is probably as close to a letter-perfect rendering of the text as we can hope to get. After enduring the whole, I heartily recommend that all Wakeans, all Joyceans who claim to be profes...

John Sherman & Dhoya

John Sherman and Dhoya, novella and story, are among the earliest of W.B. Yeats's published compositions, begun at his father's prompting when the young poet was living in London in 1888.

John Sherman is a poignant and delightful narrative that dra...

Larks' Eggs: New and Selected Stories

Des Hogan is, and has always been, the real thing - a writer of great originality, dramatic flair, linguistic invention - who remakes the world every time he puts pen to paper.' Neil Jordan

Desmond Hogan is one of most remarkable literary...

Leaving Ardglass

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'One of the best novels to have come out of Ireland in a long time &hellip; it chronicles not just a personal and spiritual journey but the state of a nation over 40 years. Outstanding....

Mushroom Man

'I found it compelling - mystique and mystery are interwoven with great cunning and guile.'
- John Boorman

Mushroom Man is the tale of a loner whose move to the mountains takes him on a self-styled odyssey mapped by hallucinoge...

My Traitor

'Terrible and beautiful.'
Le Nouvel Observateur

'Fascinating.'
L'Express

'A virtuoso novel, sharp as a knife, that takes us to the very heart of lif...

Nothing to Say

'He was always a great actor and talker. Words loved him. Now he's a great writer.' Bono

'Nothing to Say is about childhood - the most difficult of all stories to tell. Few writers attempt it and those who do usually fail. But...

Old Swords

These eleven stories by Desmond Hogan, his first publication since Larks' Eggs: New and Selected Stories (2005), collect newly minted shards of experience focused on the lives of the dreamers and marginalized who populate his imagined worlds. They...

Revolutions

Evening Herald/Today FM Paperback Writer Competition Winner

Marysol Castillo is a Cuban-American girl living in Miami. Haunted by the loss of their homeland, her parents and friends 'imagine their little two-bedroom homes to be Santa Clar...

Snapshots

'Nothing is fair in love and war. When has it ever been? But make sure you win. That is, after all, what everybody wants. I thought that when I fell in love I'd leave a lot of death behind. But love isn't pure and shiny. It doesn't make you happy. Love is ...

Song of Duiske

In south Kilkenny, where Duiske stream joins the river Barrow at Graiguenamanagh, lies one of Ireland's many Norman-Cistercian abbeys. Song of Duiske is a novella set amongst this monastic community in the year 1304, a century after the abbey'...

South of the Border HB

'This is the work of a major historical novelist. But it is something more than that too: the term "historical novel" has a reductive ring to it, as would the description "political novel". What we get here is imaginative fiction of a high order, built on ...

South of the Border PB

'This is the work of a major historical novelist. But it is something more than that too: the term "historical novel" has a reductive ring to it, as would the description "political novel". What we get here is imaginative fiction of a high order, built on ...

Story of a Girl

'Tom Mac Intyre's wildly eloquent novel reads at times like Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood re-written by someone who has spent years reading Finnegan's Wake. Here we are offered one voice that is unmistakably Irish and the accent is definitely Mac Intyre's...

The Beautiful Changes

'McCloskey's gift for capturing the precarious nature of interpersonal relations and the exquisite pain of isolated consciousnes is matched by her ability to construct startling and unpredictable plots that encompass many retrospectives and re...

The Canal Bridge

'... a lad could be sent to any place in the world, to any spot in the empire on which the sun never set, an empire with huge mountains and lakes with no bottoms to them; waterfalls a mile high; rivers a hundred miles across where they floated int...

The Carvaggio Conspiracy

Caravaggio was the greatest artist since Titian, a favourite of Popes and wealthy bankers. But at a time when the resurgent Ottoman Em...

The Dark Companion: Ghost Stories

These tales of twilight and borderlands depart from an oral tradition developed through the writings of William Beckford, Mary Shelley, Sheridan Le Fanu, M.R. James and others. They are concerned with the life of the mind and imagination, fear and the...

The Devil to Pay: The Story of Alice and Petronilla

Kilkenny, 1324.

Alice Kyteler, outspoken daughter of a wealthy Flemish banker, has survived four husbands and is beset by the gossip and rivalry of a medieval Anglo-Norman town. Her beautiful maid is Petronilla, child of an itinerant shoemake...

The Fabulists

Rights: World (X UK rights sold to Serif)
Listowel Writers' Week Book of the Year 1995
The Fabulists is a love story set in contemporary Dublin. After a brief encounter on the Ha'penny Bridge over the Liffey, Tess and Mungo contrive to make the...

The House of Slamming Doors

'My name is Justin Alexander Torquhil Edward Peregrine Montague, but my father calls me 'you little bollocks', or when he is in a good mood, 'old cock'.

It's 1963 in a country house in west Wicklow during the he...

The Marriage at Antibes

The Pilgrimage

'She felt like a woman imprisoned in a luxurious room; to whom visitors are admitted; whose life goes on very much as it has always done; but who is conscious that if she lifted the thick carpet she would gaze down into a pit of wild beasts.'

Julia Gly...

The Sway of Winter

'Orla Murphy writes with painterly poise. Her canvas may be small-town life but her territory is the emotional offshore. The Sway of Winter shimmers - a wry and luminous exploration of both the terrible wreckage and the tentative redemption of love.' - Mar...

The Waking of Willie Ryan

Willie Ryan returns to his home town in 'the great central plain of Ireland', having escaped from the insane asylum where he was committed, and unvisited, by his devout Catholic family for twenty-five years. The given pretext for his commitment was an atta...

Through the Gate of Ivory

'A vivid recreation of a distant epoch, this book combines fine storytelling with the wisdom of a sage who knows that Irish identity was always a matter of negotiation between different traditions . . . Its pacy narrative is at once vivacious and scholarly...

Ulysses - The Dublin Edition Special (101 - 1000)

Limited to 1000 numbered copies. Cloth-covered boards with gilt-stamped lettering on spine in cloth-covered slipcase. Includes satin pagemarker.

Ulysses, the summit of Joyce's achievement and of modern literature, represents a day - 16 June 190...

Waiting for Billy & Other Stories

Martin Healy was a young man when he died, but he wrote with a breadth of insight and sympathy that few writers ever achieve. The twelve stories gathered here represent the best work o...

Winter Bayou

'Each time we lay down together, I thought of pounding fetlocks, the flex of tendons, the press of horse shoe against my chest, the ring of purple flesh it would leave on my stomach, his galloping, galloping into me ...

Each night, after, I filled the ...

With My Lazy Eye

Julia Kelly's is surely the freshest voice in Irish fiction since the wonderful early novels of Edna O'Brien. This is a future to watch.' - John Banville

This remarkable first novel releases the voice of Lucy Bastonme (or Bunty) as she makes her j...