This book traces the rise and decline of the Anglo-Irish country gentry during the lifetime of Molly Keane (1904-96), one of its most original and witty novelists. Her career spanned two world wars, the 1916 Rising and civil war. Molly Keane's writing is examined from a first novel in her teens through discussion o fher eleven subsequent books and five plays. The early death of her husband, followed by the failure of her last play in 1942, effectively stopped her writing for almost twenty years, until the explisive release of her much-loved novels Good Behaviour, Time After Time and Loving and Giving in the 1980s, when she became a media star.

MARJORIE QUARTON was born in Tipperary in 1930. Her previous books have been published by The Lilliput Press.

This fascinating journey will be released by The Lilliput Press in 2012. 

These stories are set in Portobello, on the edge of Dublin city, just inside the canal. Its characters are like that - on the edge of life: Michael, the country boy who drowns himself; Harry, the old Jewish dealer living alone; Liam, the simple emigrant returning on a visit. Through their eyes, we follow the author's progress. Old friends are met, in loss or renewal, making or trying to make fresh starts, or looking back through the glass of time. Disappointment, happiness and uncertainty lead to the realization that this place has become what the author had always thought was elsewhere - his home. Written over the past thirty years, together these tales form a greater story - that of one man's life in one place. 

ADRIAN KENNY, born in Dublin in 1945, was educated at Gonzaga College and University College Dublin. He has worked as an English teacher in Ireland and abroad, and as a freelance journalist and broadcaster. The Family Business, and autobiography, was published by The Lilliput Press in 1999. 

Using a play by Karl and Josef Capek as source, Flann OﾒBrien locates his insect drama in Dublin, his most familiar stalking- territory. His adaptation is a vehicle for ridicule and invective, targeting race, religion, greed, identity and purpose. With his extraordinary ear for dialogue, OﾒBrien creates his own fantastical world, and the outcome is a hilarious satire of Irish stereotypes ﾖ as Orangemen, Dubliners, Corkagians and culchies become warring ants, bees, crickets, dung-beetles, and other small-minded invertebrae. The lost text of this play, Hilton Edwardsﾒ prompt copy from the 1943 Gate Theatre performance, was discovered in the archives at Northwestern University, Illinois. ﾑA play by Irelandﾒs most celebrated comic writer, Flann OﾒBrien, lost for fifty years, has been discovered in the archives of Northwestern University, Illinois, by an American academic. The OﾒBrien play, Rhapsody in Stephenﾒs Green, was put on in Dublin by the Edwards-MacLiammoir company at the Gaiety Theatre during Lent in 1943 with a cast of 150 ﾗ representing millions, as is obligatory with an insect play. But, presumably because of the offence it gave to Catholics, Ulster Protestants, Irish civil servants, Corkmen, and the aspersions it seemed to cast on married life and the superpatriotic Fianna Fáil party, it only ran six days and was never again performed ... However it and the context in which it was born ﾗ and rapidly snuffed out ﾗ gives intriguing insights into neutral Ireland of the 1940s, suffocating in puritanism and insular politics.ﾒ Peter Lennon, The Guardian, 17 Nov.1994. FLANN OﾒBRIEN, (aka Myles na gCopaleen, Brian OﾒNolan), Irish civil servant and toper, was a novelist, journalist, critic, playwright, and comic writer of genius. He died on April Foolﾒs Day, 1966, aged fifty-five.

 

Caravaggio was the greatest artist since Titian, a favourite of Popes and wealthy bankers. But at a time when the resurgent Ottoman Empire was planning a second wave of conquest, he discovered a secret so dark that it threatened the very existence of the Catholic Church.

The secret endures. Four hundred years later, Declan O’Malley, the first Irish-born Superior General of the Society of Jesus, learns that his friend, the German Cardinal Horst Rüttgers, has died in mysterious circumstances. With his nephew Liam Dempsey, recovering from wounds received while serving as a soldier with the United Nations, he tries to uncover the truth, bringing him into conflict with the sinister and virulently anti-Muslim Cardinal Bosani – Camerlengo, or High Chamberlain, of the Holy Roman Church – in charge of the upcoming Conclave to elect a new Pope.

As the two prelates grapple, Dempsey finds a bizarre link between Bosani and Caravaggio’s masterpiece, ‘The Betrayal of Christ’, lost for 200 years until it emerged in 1999 in the unlikely setting of the Jesuit house in Dublin. The painting turns out to be more than a sublime depiction of Christ’s seizure in the Garden of Gethsemane; it is also the key to a centuries-old conspiracy of evil. Can O’Malley and Dempsey, aided by the cool and resourceful Maya Studer, daughter of the Commandant of the Swiss Guard, prevent Bosani from re-igniting a calamitous war between Europe and the Muslim World?

WALTER ELLIS is a journalist who worked as a feature writer and foreign correspondent for The Irish Times, Financial Times, Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Times. He is the author of two non-fiction books, The Oxbridge Conspiracy, about elitism in British higher education, and The Beginning of the End, a memoir of growing up in Belfast as best friend to the man who would become the INLA’s most ruthless assassin. Both books were widely reviewed and serialized. Born in Belfast, Ellis now lives in new York.