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Poetry
If you are interested in exploring poetry or if you are a devoted reader expanding your collection, this bundle offers two poetry books by Irish poets and publishers for just $15.
To learn more about each title available, please visit the ‘Poetry’ section of the online shop.
‘Mícheál McCann’s debut collection, Devotion, is a stately book — courtly, even.’ So wrote Declan Ryan in The Irish Times. In that rapturously received first book the author applied a modern setting, sensibility and set of references to a classic Irish lament. In Lives of the Saints he builds on biographical details of Christian figures and situates them in contemporary states of experience and emotion. Centrepieces of this eclectic collection are an ode to a recycling centre and ‘The Impossible Request’ in which the poet’s grandmother forgets that he has told her that he is gay (‘I know, pet, I know’) and asks if he has any girlfriends yet. Assured in its risks, vigorous in its enthusiasms, from its first ecstatic injunction Lives of the Saints is a collection to make one think and feel, then think again.
As I drive home, without shame, I decide on the name
of a girlfriend and her smile will be as wide as the morning.
— ‘The Impossible Request’
Atlantic Fret unveils a focus, indeed a constancy of purpose, uncommon in a first collection. From the Blasket Islands in the opening poem to Iceland — the book concluding with adaptations of an Icelandic modernist classic — Stephen de Búrca embraces the idea of the Atlantic Ocean as the source of chaos from which the Cosmos grew. Against the backdrop of climate change the Ocean shares the burden of grief while offering a space for sexual freedom and self-expression.
In its impressive range of formal attainment, including the elegiac title sequence and the imaginative ‘Tide Clock’ sequence, Atlantic Fret reveals a writer sensitively attuned to inner and outer tensions, ‘to what the reeds, / curving like fishing rods, might be reeling in — // the shadows of small fish, the currents / at odds with one another, the river coming to terms / with sea water’. The result is a poetry collection that is genuinely affecting.
In The End of Art Zara Meadows writes about love, queer identities, and family connections alongside a redrawing of contemporary Belfast.
These poems couldn't be written from anywhere other than Belfast - Zara's hometown and base - offering a modern take on the city without forgetting its histories.
In doing so, Meadows also simultaneously looks at forging their own identity alongside the changing city; these poems might be haunted by ghosts that the poet lives alongside, but they're also full of humour and tenderness.
The Hare’s Corner celebrates farmers, families, schools and community groups all over Ireland who are restoring habitats, reviving biodiversity and reconnecting people with the land.
Uplifting stories and poems interwoven with enchanting illustrations and photographs bear witness to the renewal and well-being that can blossom when we make space for nature in our lives.
Named after the traditional farming practice of leaving field corners for wildlife, The Hare’s Corner is inspired by small, thoughtful actions that can spark powerful change. Readers are invited to rediscover the beauty and wonders of their own landscapes, urban and rural.
Bebe Ashley's prizewinning second collection charts the poet's efforts to qualify as a British Sign Language interpreter. Intershot with enquiries into the nature of language as it is spoken and signed, how our medium of communication shapes our words, and the process of leaving and finding home, Harbour Doubts is a collection that tangles with the burning desire to communicate in the isolation of a late capitalist, post-pandemic world. It's also a love letter to the delights of linguistics and language, a three-dimensional exploration of words and the body.
Bringing together meditations on language as mediated through sound, sign, vision, and film, this exciting sophomore collection cements Bebe Ashley's reputation as a fearless experimenter.
Pulsing with the energy of urban life, these poems traverse the gritty, playful and tender moments that shape our lives. From the thrill of evading the police in ‘The Chase’ to the nostalgia of ‘New Shoes’ and the sheer abandon of ‘The Amusements’, we are pulled deep into a world where chaos and community intersect. With a clarion and uncompromising voice, Charles Lang maps a labyrinth of memories, blending sharp wit with darker undercurrents as he explores identity, masculinity, class and ecology.
Whether reflecting on family, friendships or fleeting moments of euphoria, Lang offers an authentic snapshot of working-class lives, where beauty is found in both the mundane and the extraordinary; in the human and the more-than-human. A sonorous celebration of language and place, The Oasis is a vivid ode to the city’s streets and stories, a testament to resilience and belonging.
Crowd Work is the venturous debut by writer Sam Furlong. With candour, its poems detail experiences of a body’s living, materialities it inhabits and shares with bodies and other species. Also, the qualities of pain, and the complexities and contradictions of intimacy.
From densely sculpted sonnets to capacious prose forms and ekphrasis, Furlong’s uses of image and tonal variation interweave voyeurism with masochisms and transfiguration. Devotional gestures are amplified from the private to many-voiced conversations, expressly in the sequence ‘Crowd Work’, an unflinching interrogation of the performative side of identity in stand-up’s public setting.
Radically amatory, this debut performs a body’s wanton poetries. Re-making forms, it renders explicit the means by which ‘Through breaking, we are made.’
Dane Holt’s subject is often the aftermath of tragedy – ecological, personal or social – but these poems grieve in surprising ways. Deflection, displacement and refracted voices combine to animate a world of brilliantly realised situations. And Holt’s characters, though always articulate, do not precisely comprehend their own relation to what they inherit.
Compelling, funny, endlessly inventive, this bold debut collection explores the formation and disillusion of masculinity and community, exposing just how tender and brittle these constructs are.
A Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Spring 2025.
The characters that live and breathe in Jake Hawkey’s impressive debut poetry collection are playful and spiritual, often both defensive and desperately vulnerable. Taking its title from the language of addiction, with its circles of prevarication and excuse, But & Though leads us on a boy’s journey through a childhood overshadowed by parental alcoholism.
These are poems on the move in the tapestry of London life – from the hospital ward to the back rows of the bus – where the desire for escape is also, paradoxically, a ‘Herculean search for home’. But & Though is a testament to the kinship ties that bind us together, however fraught they become, and a celebration of the working-class identity that defines the poet’s native south London. With a voice as spiky and irreverent as it is gentle, Jake Hawkey is a refreshing new talent in English poetry.
! All'arme / ? And what... if not, published by Macha Press in 2024, is a tȇte-bȇche (head-to-toe or double) publication comprised of two experimental poetic works and a sequence of typographical sculptures by Belfast poet and artist Eilish Martin.
A ‘career apex’ poet whose natural home is at once on the margins and at the heart of the hybrid, Eilish Martin’s practice in ! All'arme / ? And what… if not is at once experimental, interdisciplinary and intercultural.
In content and visionary concept, the poetries published in this tête-bêche (head-to-toe) double book brings together lyrical fragmentation and narrative drive, language play, intertextual dialogue and textual innovation with unsettling anxieties and deep care for public and private worlds.
The collection catalogues some small part of what she herself has referred to as the ‘compulsive journey’ of her poetry-making and verbal-visual improvisations across the past ten years.
dismantle is a reimagining, a re-examining of what it means to be human. Here is the arc of a life, from first cell to last breath and beyond. Pulsating with emotional energy, these poems ask difficult questions with uncertain answers: what is it to be a child, a daughter, a woman, a man? And what's more, what is it to be? Imbued with the fierce energy of the crone, dismantle reclaims our connection to our true wild nature and the deep earth. This is a dismantling in the truest sense—of time and memory, of the ideas we inherit, of the self.
In High Jump as Icarus Story, Gustav Parker Hibbett gifts us visions of flight and falling. This stunningly accomplished debut deconstructs and redefines notions of Blackness, queerness, and masculinity through the lens of myth, pop culture, and that most transcendent of sports - the high jump. Formally inventive, these poems speak in a capacious voice which can be vulnerable, fragmented, and rapturous; exhorting us to imagine and reimagine our possible selves while navigating a labyrinthine America that conjures its young into monsters.
Taking us from the arroyos of New Mexico to a West Cork farm in winter, these meditations on beauty and the elusive nature of love are insightful, and hard-won. Here, the spirit triumphs, even when body falls: 'having/ reached for sunlight,/ even if I failed to hold it.'
is a collaborative poetry collection by Jo Burns and Emily Cooper which imagines a conversation held between Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar and Françoise Gilot, three of Picasso’s lovers and subjects. More often than not these figures were not named, but titled by their actions: weeping, reading, reclining. What Picasso wilfully obscured was the women behind these paintings: their lives and works, their relationships with him, their children and careers that were indelibly marked by their connection to a man considered to be one of the greatest artists of all time.
Alicia Byrne Keane’s Pretend Cartoon Strength is a meditation on coastlines, migration, spatial theory, and desire among apocalyptic times. Meandering through confined communal living spaces and ethereal winter shores, these poems are both unnerving and poignant, and bear witness to the quiet terrors of being alive. Byrne Keane presents a restless and evolving consciousness fixated on the uncertainties of modern existence, while also referencing Dublin's housing woes, Nokia games, and 2016 makeup trends. This is a book that asks for a place in our homes and our bodies, and one that offers many.
Demons, geese, The Laughing Cow, marching bands, LSD and pistols smuggled home from the USSR. You'll find all these in Scott McKendry's GUB. Rooted in the language of working-class Belfast, and slipping between eras and time zones, closing the gap between the real and the fantastical, the academic and the everyday, the parish and the polis, McKendry's exhilarating debut collection comes to terms with generational trauma, social decay and the rituals of a place with a fraught history and an uncertain future.
Invoking the balaclava'd gunmen, urban warlords and explosions which gripped the decades either side of the Good Friday Agreement, GUB drags the language of ghettoised Belfast into serious Irish poetry. Wearing the lyrical influences of his 'ugly city' lightly - Carson, McGuckian, Longley - McKendry's tightly-wrought structures weave an unprecedented verse of mourning, witness, alter ego, class alienation and aesthetic turmoil. Noisy, dark and witty, GUB is an utterly new voice out of Belfast, but one posting bulletins across inner-city neighbourhoods everywhere.
In her debut collection, Rosamund Taylor dares us across thresholds and invites us to glimpse the world as we’ve never seen it before. She boldly charts a journey of survival and transformation with poems on history reimagined, astronomy, sorcery, wild landscapes, talismanic creatures, and queer love.
Taylor explores what it means to live in a female body that is not defined by lack, or want, or perpetual suffering, but is possessed by a real and defined sense of erotic autonomy.
These poems burn from the inside out with possibility, and there is magic, mystery and reclamation at every turn. In Her Jaws is a landmark debut that extends and deepens the Irish tradition of writing the female perspective, while also breaking new ground.
“… this is gorgeous, subtle and heartfelt work. Matthew Rice can take a single memory, carve it out of the infinitely re-configurable past, then light and shoot it so that it resembles heaven or hell. The pause at the red light, the school canteen, those we lose, those we keep, then lose; the connections which might arise from a song or a video game. Transporting stuff…” – Luke Kennard
“These poems are attuned to threat, loss, disappointment, resolve. A tense narrative blurs with acceleration into a soft dazzle of lyricism; or the well-borne weight of form and tradition lifts to reveal a friend having a kind and urgent word. You leave the room and things have changed.” – Adam Crothers
“Marked by a distinctive combination of savagery and ennui, Matthew Rice’s poems are surreal snapshots. They conjure an atmosphere of cinema noir. Rice reaches back to the absurd cruelties of history, concluding ‘there is no why here’, as Primo Levi is forbidden to enjoy even the chance refreshment of an icicle. These poems are located in moments of tradition. However, Rice maintains an eloquent refusal to glamorise. This is an exciting and long-awaited debut” – Katie Donovan
Winner of the Clarissa Luard Prize 2021. The poems of Some Integrity bring something new to the Irish lyric tradition. Queerness is a way of looking, a perspective, grounded in an awareness of the porous and provisional nature of our bodies. The book's social encounters and exchanges, its responses to the work of artists, its figures in a landscape, and its considerations of food and desire, work as capsule narratives and as an exhilarating extension of that lyric tradition.
Manuela Moser’s Last night, the mountain is a breathless game of contradictions: part dream, part discourse; yearning and sardonic; halting and cascading. Its terrain is an Escheresque tapestry of grey skies, crushed velvet mountains, rescue helicopters, sex tapes and sad swimming pools. Full of notes and examples that frame and reframe experience, this pamphlet hones in on the ways we assimilate phenomena, cumulatively asking of what, if anything, we can be sure.
“it’s not very feminist to consider myself a mouldy slut
I’ve agency over my body and all that 21st-century shite”
A young woman wakes feeling raw and tender after a one-night stand. She leaves a strange man sleeping in her bed and goes running. Marked by the anxiety of living in a city that does not feel like home, she must face the memories and men kept under her bed.
Victoria Kennefick's daring first book, Eat or We Both Starve, draws readers into seemingly recognisable set-pieces - the family home, the shared meal, the rituals of historical occasions, desire - but Kennefick forges this material into new shapes, making them viable again for exploring what it is to live with the past - and not to be consumed by it.
Rebecca Goss writes: 'Victoria Kennefick writes with a fresh urgency, giving us poems that are honest and fearless. She once said: "Poetry has saved my life, made my life.
Reading and writing it have taught me bravery and discipline." Kennefick is unafraid to explore bereavement, sex and the female body in her poetry. She writes with a visceral originality. Her poems are rich with physical sensations.
She is able to find beauty in the big subjects like sorrow and desire, offering us the finest, most startling details. Her identity as a young Irish woman is hugely important to her, something she explores with intelligence and candour. I have always felt there is nothing Victoria could not tackle.
The scope in her work is exhilarating.'
Fiction
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The more she learned, the more certain she became: this other world was alive and true and trembling, and very close to her own. Now she had a secretIn the city of Cork, a derelict Victorian mental hospital is being converted into modern apartments.
One passerby has always flinched as she passes the place. Had she lived in another time, she too might have found herself held within those walls. Now, she notices a sign: FOR SALE.
It is the first of many signs. Guided by an irresistible impulse, she follows them. Soon, she is trespassing, stealing, absconding from the routine of mother, spouse, daughter, as she uncovers a chorus of startling voices: those of the women who knew the hospital best.
They murmur from archives and old records. They haunt from stairwells and walls. In them - and in one figure in particular -- she may find meaning and solace, righteous anger, salvation even.
Or her final vanishing?A work of sublime intensity and tenderness, Said the Dead breaks the boundaries between worlds -- past and present, imagined and real, fact and fiction - to make something new and lasting: an experience full of danger, full of love and full of truth.
On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomás and his reluctant son, Liam, are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland.
The year is 1865, and in a country not long since ravaged and emptied by the Great Hunger, the task is not an easy one. Tomás, however, is determined that his maps will be a record of the disaster. The British soldiers in charge are due to arrive any day, expecting the work to be completed, but Tomás is sent off course by an unsettling encounter in a copse.
His life, and those of his family, will never be the same again. Liam is terrified by the sudden change in his taciturn father. What was it that caused such cracks to open in Tomás and how is Liam, aged only ten, going to finish the mapping, and get them both home?Land is a story of buried treasure, overlapping lives, ancient woodland, persistent ghosts, a particularly loyal dog, and how, when it comes to both land and history, nothing ever goes away.
Dylan, Stevie and Ben have been inseparable since their days at Trinity, when life pulsed with possibility. A single glance can still summon their younger selves: dancing beneath flashing lights, salt on their skin after swims in Dublin Bay.
Two decades later, their dreams have faltered. Dylan, once a rugby star, is stranded on the sofa, tended by his wife, Rachel.
Across town, in their new build, Stevie and Ben's relationship has settled into an airless routine. Then, after countless auditions, Ben lands a role in Pinter's Betrayal.
As rehearsals unfold, the play's shifting loyalties seep into reality, stirring old jealousies and awakening forbidden longings, as each must confront how far they are willing to go in pursuit of desire.
Wry, sexy and deftly observed, Little Vanities is a novel about the perilous thrill of stepping outside the roles we've been given-and the distance between the lives we imagined and the ones we find ourselves living.
Derry is already abuzz with news that famous American actor, Monica Logue, has flown to the city and will be starring in a new series set during the Troubles.
And then she goes missing . . .
All eyes are on Diarmuid, the flaky scriptwriter who was the last to see Monica alive. From budding young actors hoping for a role to grieving parent whose story forms the backbone of the narrative; newspaper editors covering the mystery to taxi drivers hearing all the news from their clients, Prestige Drama follows the city's cast as they all try to locate themselves in Monica's disappearance. Séamas O'Reilly's debut novel is a comedy about dramatising tragedy, and the responsibilities of a teller to a tale.
In this spellbinding anthology, Ireland's most electrifying female writers breathe new life into ancient Irish myths, reclaiming the stories of women who have too long stood in the shadows of warriors and kings. Editor and journalist Ailbhe Malone was raised on these legends - but the women, always cast as mothers, warriors or witches, were never given the lead. And so, Banshee was born: not just a retelling but a radical reclamation.
Banshee transports you to treacherous landscapes and salt-crashing seas, generational curses and mystical islands. Here you'll find unruly mothers, rule-breaking queens, and women outrunning their destiny - stories pulsing with desire, danger and defiance. This is a celebration of womanhood - and an homage to the ancient stories that still shape us.
The Traveller families who live in Saint Rita’s are on borrowed time. In just a week they will be evicted by the local council, threatening not only their homes but also their history and the stories that have shaped them. Charlene, a proud young beoir suffers a humiliating betrayal.
Her mother, Kate, is left to navigate unbearable loss while holding the family together. Her cousin, Sheena, strives to find her place in a new environment that is quick to dismiss her. Her uncle Tommy fights despair as his teenage son spirals out of control.
As eviction day draws closer, the families struggle to preserve their dignity finding strength in one another as they navigate an unknown future. Unflinching, Contentious Spaces is a haunting story about identity and loyalty, shame and resilience, grief and love, and the defiant power of voices that refuse to be silenced.
When Cork academic Seán kills an annoying fly and examines it under his flatmate's microscope, he makes a discovery that will shatter everything he believes about reality. What he sees in that tiny specimen launches him into a labyrinth of historical conspiracy, ancient texts, and dangerous secrets that powerful people have killed to protect.
As Seán and his fellow researchers dive deeper, they uncover evidence that this same discovery was made centuries ago by some of Europe's greatest minds—Galileo, Milton, Newton — only to be ruthlessly suppressed. From the scientific academies of 17th-century Amsterdam and Paris to the corridors of power in Renaissance Rome, a hidden truth has been carefully buried, one that challenges our understanding of human civilisation itself. But knowledge this profound comes at a price.
As the mystery deepens, Seán realises that some secrets have guardians who will stop at nothing to keep them hidden. In our age of deepfakes and social media deception, EL asks the most urgent question of our time: who controls reality? Part academic thriller, part historical mystery, EL is a mind-bending exploration of truth, faith and the price of knowledge that asks: what if everything we think we know about our place in the universe is wrong? Translated from Irish by the author, this award-winning work captures the authentic voice of contemporary Irish literature. This novel was first published in Irish by Coiscéim and was awarded Irish Language Novel of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards.
How do you mourn someone you never really knew? Three siblings – Anna, Gemma and Matthew – will have to work that out quickly.
Monday is the day of their gentle, but distant, father’s funeral, and for the first time in a long while they are under one roof with their mother, imperious Yvonne, awaiting the arrival of their aunt Amy, an award-winning poet. Yet, as the funeral looms, their everyday concerns refuse to diminish: will newly sex-obsessed Gemma work out what she wants from life, beyond her mother’s expectations? Can Anna maintain the fine balance between desire and nonchalance with her not-quite-exclusive boyfriend back in London? Will Amy’s past explode the relationships of the present? And, crucially, will Yvonne pull off her grand, post-funeral family dinner, the solution to what she fears may be an unsolvable problem? Told from five perspectives, into the wreck worries at the knotty complexities of one family’s bonds, written with Susannah Dickey’s trademark empathy and wit.
It’s summer 2017 and the last few residents of the Lough Neagh Archipelago are facing imminent eviction. The flood planned to combat a devastating algae outbreak will submerge their homes, forcing them back to the Mainland for the first time in fifty years.
Robert-John and Marion Connolly came to the islands as children in the 1970s, following their mercurial father, an anthropologist studying the unique society that had developed there. For many, the Neagh Archipelago represented a utopia, a chance to be free of the prejudices and history of Troubles era Northern Ireland. But perhaps this utopia wasn’t all that it seemed.
Marion and Robert-John have grown accustomed to their haunted existence on the Ark, monitoring the mysterious Far Side, where ghostly figures linger and the land swallows secrets whole. How will they cope with a new life on the Mainland? Is it possible to leave the past behind? And will the Ark ever let them go?
For Niamh Ryan, the Foleys are family. Her childhood flew by on their farm, playing with her best friend Peter and his sister Kate - all the while being doted on by their mother Helen and coached by their father Liam, a legendary former hurling player.
Now, following a distressing series of events, the family ties are strained. Niamh receives drunken phone calls and messages from Peter who can't understand what derailed their burgeoning relationship three years ago. Meanwhile, Helen Foley is trying her best to escape her life by checking into guesthouses under the names of women she went to school with.
In her life in Belfast, Kate is attempting to hold down a job and a relationship while carrying the weight of the family's secrets, and feeling like she is the one to blame. As a family wedding looms, and the women find themselves face to face, the knotty love that still binds Niamh, Helen and Kate might just bring them back together again. Told through the perspectives of three very different women, Everything That Is Beautiful unfolds the story of one complicated family in startlingly honest prose.
By turns funny and deeply moving, and with unmatched emotional intelligence, this is an unforgettable story of love and family, heartbreak and hope - and who we might become after we pick up the pieces.
Things are different since Tony Ward landed back in town. The West Dublin gangland has changed. His old mentor is dead, and his best pal Kenny Boyle is on the straight and narrow.
After five years keeping quiet across the way, Tony is keen to reinstate himself, and when the opportunity arises to work side by side with Darren 'Flute' Walsh, a top enforcer of notorious crime boss Aengus Lavelle, it feels like a no brainer. Biting off more than he can chew has never bothered Tony Ward, but Flute Walsh is not the meek, quiet boy Tony remembers from school. Brooding, stoic, and unpredictably dangerous, Tony finds himself drawn to his new associate in more ways than one.
With retribution from his past actions always close in the rear view, the protection offered by Flute's standing in the gang is crucial. But how safe is Tony really, when a mutual attraction starts to complicate matters?By turns savage, thrilling and unexpectedly tender, All Them Dogs is a gripping story of violence, lust, and greed that explores one man's struggles to find his place in an unsparing world.
What do you do when you've ruined your life? You go home to your mother, if you're lucky enough still to have one. Saoirse Maher wouldn't recommend it. Leaving home wasn't supposed to be temporary.
When she moved to London, Saoirse was leaving Ireland behind for good, and with it her messy, broken family. But it turns out that starting again isn't as easy as she imagined, and when her five-year relationship goes south, Saoirse finds herself out of options. And so here she is, trudging back to her mother Máire's house up a side road on the outskirts of Irish civilisation. Except the world she comes back to is nothing like the one she left behind.
Her mother has a new family, and everyone else seems to be moving on. But between the drinking, drugs, and an entirely healthy, not-problematic-at-all-thanks relationship with Charlie, there's plenty to distract her. Don't look too closely, and everything's fine.
Saoirse is just fine.
Claire O’Connor’s life has been on hold since she broke up with Tom Morton and moved from London back home to the rugged West of Ireland to care for her dying father. But glimpses of her old life are sure to follow when Tom unexpectedly moves nearby. As Claire is thrown into a love she thought she’d left behind, she questions if Tom has come for her or for himself.
Living in her childhood home brings its own challenges. While Claire tries to maintain a normal life – getting lost online, going to work and minding her own business – Tom’s return stirs up haunting memories trapped within the walls of the old family house. Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way is a story of love and resilience, rich with history and drama, and the legacies of violence and redemption.
As the secrets of the past are revealed, Claire must confront whether she can escape her history to make a future for herself.
You're the love of Esther's life. You just don't know it yet...
Esther first sees Ted walking in a park in London. They lock eyes and for a fraction of a second, she feels something she’s never felt before. She starts by reading up about his life in Canada and his work as an actor.
Then she watches every interview with him online. It isn’t long before she’s joined Ted’s fan site online where her and the ‘Tedettes’ stalk his every move. When Ted gets a new celebrity girlfriend, Esther decides that things have gone far enough.
She leaves her husband, takes all their savings, and buys a one-way ticket to Canada. After all, Ted might not know it yet, but they are meant to be together – he just needs a little bit of persuading...
It is a little-known fact that Ernie O’Malley, renowned for his role in Ireland’s revolutionary struggle, was also a passionate collector of Irish folklore.
Centred on O’Malley’s native Clew Bay and its environs and transcribed by his son Cormac, The Enchanted Bay is a rich tapestry of tales that showcases the enduring power of the oral tradition in Ireland. From the entertaining exploits of the Gobán Saor, mythical master builder, to the Clare Island man who married a selkie, this collection offers a glimpse into the heart of Irish storytelling.
A testament to O’Malley’s multifaceted legacy, several of the stories in this compilation were gathered while he travelled Ireland as an IRA organiser. The insights he gained through folklore collecting would later inform his ambitious project of recording testimonies from former comrades, solidifying his place as a pivotal figure in the preservation of Irish history and culture.
The tales in these pages maintain the unique voices of local communities, conjuring an arcane, fascinating world that is slipping further from memory.
Flowing from source to sea, our rivers are the life-blood of Ireland. They have shaped the landscape, history, folkore and mythology of the island. And have inspired legends, tales, songs and poetry.
Beginning with the Liffey in the east and travelling clockwise around the country to end with the Boyne, Where the Waters Flow tells the histories, tales and legends of fifteen of Ireland’s best-known rivers. Richly illustrated with historic engravings, wildlife drawings and photographs, old and new.
A remarkable new literary comedy from the author of Jammy Dodger, shortlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize.
Businessman Fenton Conville has it all sewn up, coasting through life with his mates and his money in a sleepy Northern Irish village. Until, that is, he wakes on his fiftieth birthday to an unexpected solicitor’s letter and a shocking allegation that could blow his world apart. In this sharp-eyed comedy of memories, middle age and long-buried mistakes, a privileged entrepreneur feels the chill winds of post-Brexit change in a society struggling to account for its past.
Ultimately, Injury Time is a poignant, acerbic look at a man out of sync with the world around him. Kevin Smith’s prose is by turns hilarious and incisive, blending satire with a genuine exploration of aging, masculinity, and the slow erosion of certainty. This is a story about dodging bullets, literal and metaphorical, and the painful comedy of life’s second half. In the end, Fenton’s true struggle is less about money or status than finding relevance and peace as the clock runs down.
Though ten years have passed
since I swayed on the musty train
on the way to school,
as sun broke its yolk over the strand,
my stomach tenses when I stand there,
metal pole in my hand, and I hear
an echo of Mrs Wall’s voice
saying the two syllables of my name –
Orla – as sharp as the rush
of salt air when the doors open
at Booterstown.
From acclaimed poet Rosamund Taylor comes a compelling, genre-bending coming of age story. In the hostile world of Ireland’s secondary school system, Orla is discovering her burgeoning sexuality. When her friend Muireann rejects her advances, Orla turns to her online community for support, and to her charismatic English teacher Irene Wall for a love affair both passionate and annihilating.
A novel in verse about sexual awakening, masochistic love, and the transformative possibilities of community, Filly introduces two unforgettable characters in Orla and the complicated and magnetic Irene Wall. Written with Taylor’s trademark earthy lyricism, Filly is an exploration of intergenerational love and trauma, and an explosion of queer joy.
A stunning debut novel following a teenage boy as he comes of age on the west coast of Ireland, from the author of the acclaimed story collection Pure Gold. Seventeen-year-old John Masterson has no idea what he wants. It’s his last summer on the small island where he has grown up and he should be enjoying the weeks until his exam results come through.
Instead, he’s working mind-numbing shifts at the local hotel and trying to keep his head down after his mother’s nude sext to another man was leaked to the whole island. As John joins the local senior football team, gets caught up in fights and parties, and embarks on a tentative relationship with his slightly older co-worker Amber that he feels both proud and ashamed of, he can almost pretend that this summer will last forever. But soon John must face up to the choices before him: to stay or leave, to stand out or fit in, and whether to love and let himself be loved, despite or perhaps because of, the flaws that make us all human.
Fun and Games is a darkly comic, beautifully crafted debut novel that is full of feeling both harsh and tender. It takes in social class and its firm borders, manhood and its frailties, family and, of course, love. 'Brilliantly written; as evocative as it is funny.
Charlotte Brontë dazzled the world with some of literature’s most vital, richly-drawn characters. She spent her brief but extraordinary life in search of love – and eventually found it with Arthur Bell Nicholls, her father’s curate, a reserved yet passionate Irishman. The pair honeymooned in Ireland, though their joy was quenched nine months later when Charlotte died in March 1855.
The aura of mystery surrounding the enigmatic author was only to intensify after her death. Charlotte is the story of two marriages and three lives irrevocably intertwined, told by the woman who went on to wed Brontë’s widower. Theirs was a love triangle of devotion and heartache, friendship and deception, passion and obsession.
Martina Devlin’s enthralling novel re-envisions Charlotte’s pivotal time in Ireland, weaving back and forth through the novelist’s life and afterlife. It reflects upon the myths built up by those who knew her, those who thought they did, and those who longed to. ‘I was utterly enthralled by this fictional rendering of Charlotte Brontë's life—and its aftermath—as viewed through the eyes of her husband's second wife.
Set in Dublin’s Liberties, Estelle Birdy’s explosively original debut Ravelling channels the energies and agonies of young men let loose in the city, their city, navigating the tumultuous trajectory of youth and young manhood, where they balance their hopes with the harsh realities of their present. Hurtling between friendships, feuds, drug-deals, family and brushes with the law, this is modern Dublin as never before portrayed. Ravelling follows Deano, a weed-smoking hurling star, living with his aunt in an about-to-be-demolished flat; Hamza, a Pakistani Muslim atheist and precocious academic, who sells his ADHD drugs to the kids in a private school; Oisín, empathetic and iron-willed, who has begun to see his dead brother at the end of his bed; Congolese nature lover, Benit, who just wants to relax and hurl with the lads; Karl, a maybe-gay fashionista, dreaming of something better while immersing himself in his art.
Bound by friendship, place and the memories of those who’ve died too soon, these young men grapple with race, class, sex, parties, poverty, violence and Garda harassment, all while wondering what it means to be a man in twenty-first century Ireland.
1703, Kinsale, County Cork. Anne Coleman is the illegitimate child of a local lawyer and his maid; disguised as ‘Anthony’ to protect reputations, the mask suits Anne just fine. But, fixated on boats and the sea, she struggles to fit in, and her devoted mother fears for her fiercely independent and impulsive daughter.
When their secrets are exposed, the family emigrates to the new colony of Carolina, but this fresh start will bring devastating loss and stifling responsibilities. Lonely and transgressive, Anne finds comfort only with Bedelia, servant and intimate friend. But her craving for the sea-wandering life and a misjudged marriage to young Gabriel Bonny will compel Anne to take to the sea again, this time around the islands of the Caribbean, famous for plunder and piracy.
Adventure, passion and freedom await, but so do violence and disappointment. And, as she tries to stay true to herself, her hopes and her few precious friendships, Anne Bonny must also face her own privilege and the sacrifices required for enduring love.
Seaborne is the thrilling and sensuous portrait of a young woman out of step with her time and place, but never her heart.
‘I sit on the stone that will mark the bed of my bones. You’ll find the used-to-be-me, soon, flat body, washed up, wrinkly skin. No silly grin. You’ll say, What a waste of a life. Tut-tut sounds jump out. Dangle like worms from your crow’s mouth ...’
Meet Daft Matt, the Mayo man at the heart of this astonishing, form-bending story, as he wanders the streets of Castlebar in search of Devil’s feet – the claw marks of the cága, or jackdaws, who have spoken to him since he was a boy.
Yet Matt is anything but daft. In lyrical prose, Walsh Donnelly explores the complex workings of Matt’s inner life: how he deals with the loss of his twin brother as a child, navigates the carefree days of early manhood and copes with the aftermath of the horseriding accident that would see him incarcerated in the care system for the next thirty years. Richly imagined and beautifully written, this is a story for anyone who chooses to look beyond the surface of things.
‘I used to think those claws were the only things that kept me above sea-level.’
On their arrival in Trieste in 1904, James Joyce left Norah Barnacle outside a railway station while he went to scare up money. He got embroiled in a fight with a couple of sailors and was locked up for his troubles. A penniless Norah was left alone for almost an entire day and night sitting on their suitcases at the station in a city where she knew no one and where she didn't speak the language.
In real life, Norah waited for him. This novel asks - what if she hadn't? In Penelope Unbound, one of our greatest living novelists weaves a spellbinding speculative history. By unhooking Norah from her famous husband, Morrissy gives her a compelling new voice, with heartbreak and humanity all her own.
Sensual, inventive and uproariously funny, Penelope Unbound reimagines a Joycean heroine for the 21st century.
Orpen has always been an outlier in Phoenix City – the only outsider ever admitted to the ranks of the banshees, the female warriors who enforce order, and protect it from the skrake – the ravening creatures that have laid waste to the rest of the country, and gather at the city walls.
Unrest is building in the city – a deadly sickness is spreading through the workers, while an unspoken disillusionment is creeping amongst the fighting women, weary of enforcing the all-male management’s patriarchal rule, and of the cost, to their sisters, and to young new recruits, of upholding this order.
Rumour has it that banshees have been taking matters into their own hands, and taking swift and violent revenge. When Orpen’s troop leader falls under suspicion it becomes clear that Orpen will need to muster all her courage and prowess if she and her fellow banshees are going to be able to find a way to escape, and rebuild a society worth fighting for.
Well, Sailor. Here we are once more, you and me in one another’s arms. The Earth rotates beneath us and all is well, for now. . .
In her first novel for over a decade, Claire Kilroy takes us deep into the early days of motherhood. Exploring the clash of fierce love for a new life with a seismic change in identity, she vividly realises the raw, tumultuous emotions of a new mother, as her marriage strains and she struggles with questions of love, autonomy and creativity.
As she smiles at her baby, Sailor, while mentally composing her own suicide note, an old friend makes a welcome return, but can he really offer a lifeline to the woman she used to be?
When Hannah learns that famed chef Daniel Costello is facing accusations of sexual assault, she’s thrown back to the summer she spent waitressing at his high-end Dublin restaurant – the plush splendour of the dining rooms, the wild parties after service, the sizzling tension of the kitchens. But Hannah also remembers how the attention from Daniel soon morphed from kindness into something darker.
Now the restaurant is shuttered and Daniel is faced with the reality of a courtroom. His wife Julie is hiding from paparazzi lenses behind the bedroom curtains. Surrounded by the wreckage of the past, Daniel, Julie and Hannah are all forced to reconsider what happened at the restaurant. Their three different voices reveal a story of power and complicity, of the lies that we tell and the courage that it takes to face the truth.
New home, new name and newly thirty: Phoebe Forde has stepped into emigrant life in Copenhagen with her anxious dog, Dolly.
Almost three years into her gender transition, she has learned to move through the world carefully, savouring small moments of joy. A woman without a past can be anyone she wants - that is, until an unexpected visit from Grace, her first love, brings memories of Dublin and a life she thought she'd left behind. Over the course of a single weekend, as their old romance kindles something sweet and radically unfamiliar, Grace helps Phoebe to navigate the jagged edges of migration, nostalgia and hope.
Secrets, desire, blood... It all comes out in the wash.
Ciara has it all - a loving husband, well-behaved children and an immaculate home.
But behind the filters, her reality is far from what it seems. Mishti is stuck in a loveless marriage, raising her daughter in a country that is too cold, among children who look nothing like her. Lauren is mostly happy, despite being judged for letting her kids run naked, wild and free.
Then Ciara is found murdered in her pristine home and suddenly everyone is a suspect. Hushed whispers, secret rendezvous and bloody betrayals . ..
Everyone has their dirty laundry, but this goes beyond gossip. This is all-out war.
A deliciously scandalous page-turner about the dark side of suburbia that peels back the layers of Ciara's insta-perfect life to reveal friendships gone rotten, manipulation masquerading as love and families riddled with lies . . .
Nonfiction
This is a great gift for the readers in your life. The Seaside Books Gift Card can be used for online purchases.
Hungry is the powerful new memoir from Number One bestselling author Katriona O'Sullivan - a raw, courageous exploration of survival, identity and the lifelong search for self-acceptance. Raised in a home marked by poverty, addiction and abuse, Katriona defied the odds: from teenage motherhood struggling with her own addictions to becoming a university professor and successful author. But beneath the achievements lay a more private struggle - with her body, her worth, and the unrelenting drive to be enough.
In this fiercely honest memoir, she interrogates how trauma, class and gender shape the way women see themselves - and how society teaches them to measure their value. Told with stunning courage and vulnerability, Hungry is both a personal reckoning and a powerful reclaiming of body, voice and self. It is one woman's story - and a rallying cry for every woman who has ever felt she had to shrink to survive.
Meet the néaladóirí (cloud-watchers) and réadóirí (stargazers) from our past who, without the luxury of Met Éireann at their disposal, observed birds, trees, animals, as well as markers on land and sea for signs of weather change. The sheer richness and variety of terms they amassed reveal the closeness with which they observed the world around them. Swallows flying low foretold rain.
The heron’s behaviour offered many hints: Aimsir chrua thirim nuair a bhíonn an corr éisc suas in aghaidh srutha chun na sléibhte (when the heron flies upstream to the mountains the weather will be dry but rough). Fearthainn nuair a thagann sí an abhainn anuas (when she goes downstream, it will rain). Evoking countless sodden, shivery experiences on this Atlantic-swept island of ours, this beautifully illustrated gift book uses Irish words to grasp an almost-lost world through the wisdom stored in the Irish language.
'Since I’ve had my first book published, I’ve earned more from cleaning than from writing. The home economics don’t add up.' Between 2015 and 2021 Caitríona Lally published her first two novels, Eggshells and Wunderland. To buy her time to write during those years, she returned to the housekeeping department at Trinity College Dublin, a job she enjoyed as a student.
This began a negotiation between the practical and creative demands of her life, further complicated when she became pregnant and downright baffling when the pandemic hit. At Trinity, Lally and her colleagues moved through empty, hallowed libraries, bonding over rude conference attendees. At home, she was raising two children who didn’t sleep.
And the success of her first book was making her second novel seem even more arduous. Amidst all this, it was cleaning work that brought her satisfaction – immediate and lasting. In her first memoir, Lally writes with honesty and humour about trying to solve the equation of mother + cleaner + writer.
Forward and thought-provoking, self-deprecating and soaked in her singularly frank voice, Caitríona Lally puzzles over personal economics, creativity and what 'success' and 'failure' really mean in this writer’s life.
This anthology of personal essays explore how video games have shaped our lives, our cultural imagination and contemporary storytelling. From novelists and critics to game designers themselves, the writers in this collection ask the question, ‘Can video games truly be art?’ From triple-A, big budget blockbusters like Grand Theft Auto or Assassin’s Creed, to quiet, meditative Indie games like Journey or Stardew Valley, video games, like all artforms, offer us insight into ourselves and the world around us. They help shape our identities, introduce us to other ways of thinking, new languages, alternate worlds.
They can offer us escape. They can also offer us control. We reach back into the past to try and recapture the feeling of that first playthrough, the feeling of expanse, the feeling of control. Addiction is also touched on in these essays.
Video games can become a replacement for a much more dangerous addiction, and the writers tell us candidly how video games helped; wasted hours in virtual worlds, completing tasks that had no bearing on a real world they couldn’t quite deal with. These collected essays explore the good and the bad sides of gaming; how video games are used as a cypher, as a new way of looking at the world, and indeed the impact they have had on the lives of the writers themselves. Featuring contributions from acclaimed and emerging writers, both Irish and international - including Rob Doyle, John Patrick McHugh, Una-Minh Kavanagh, Brenda Romero, Sheila Armstrong, Roisin Kiberd, and more - this anthology is an exploration of one of the most influential cultural forms of our time.
BIOGRAPHY OF THE YEAR 2025 - AN POST IRISH BOOK AWARDS
At approximately 3.15 a.m. on 2 August 2015, eight-year-old Irish girl Sarah Corbett Lynch was lifted from her bed by a Davidson County police officer and carried downstairs, shielded from the chaos that had broken out around her.
Hours passed before Sarah learned that her beloved father Jason was dead. And the people who killed him were Sarah's stepmother Molly Martens and her father Tom. Now Sarah tells her story for the first time and reveals the startling truth of life behind closed doors in her family's suburban North Carolina home.
Sarah recalls the weeks and months leading up to that night in August, and the use of manipulation and gaslighting by Molly Martens - the only mother she had ever known. She describes the traumatic years after her father's death as she and her brother Jack fought for justice from the safety of their new loving home in Limerick, Ireland, with Jason's family. A Time for Truth is a unique testimony of devastation, survival and hope, against the odds.
This is not a cookbook uniquely blends memoir with food writing alongside evocative lithographic artwork. The vignettes in the book chronicle Manouchehri’s childhood growing up in Tehran in the 80s following the Iranian Revolution, the profound influence of the women who surrounded her, and the legacy of memories handed down during wartime. Weaving early impressions of politics and repression with the comfort and familiarity of home, Manouchehri offers us a glimpse of a rich but fraught culture seen through the eyes of a young girl seeking to reconcile her roots through the conduit of food.
This is not a cookbook emerges from a wholly unique voice in Irish literature, joining the ranks of contemporary diasporic Iranian writers searching for community and belonging in an elusive past.
In The Hike Life: 50 More to Explore, Rozanna Purcell showcases 50 more trails, showing off new areas around Ireland from popular hikes to lesser known trails. There are fantastic hikes like Strickeen in the Gap of Dunloe, Urris Lakes Loop in Donegal and one of Roz's own favourite dog-friendly trails outside of Dublin, 'The Devil's Glen'. It's the perfect way to get out into the great outdoors and experience the best of Ireland at your own pace.
As well as the familiar tips from book one, like trail details, route overviews, best photo spots, where to eat afterwards, great places for a wild dip or somewhere wonderful to visit, The Hike Life: 50 More to Explore also includes even more useful practical information so that every hike can be a new adventure. From the author of the Irish Times Bestseller and winner of the Irish Book Awards Lifestyle Book of the Year, The Hike Life: My Favourite 50 Hikes in Ireland.
Marking fifty years of the founding of an LGBTQ rights movement in Ireland, Reeling in the Queers explores the lesser-known stories of the fight for LGBTQ rights since 1974, beyond decriminalisation and Marriage Equality. From 1990s boy bands to the AIDS priest, Fr Bernárd Lynch, from the Belfast Lesbian Line to proud parenting, from the earliest Pride events to the last days of Alternative Miss Ireland, fourteen distinct moments map the changing social and cultural landscape of Ireland. These stories, from across the island of Ireland – and further afield – celebrate a strong community and its allies, and speak across the generations.
Together, they tell a new story of the gains, losses, devastation and community rising from the ashes of defeat. It is a hugely enjoyable and insightful read for both those who lived through this movement and for those who enjoy its benefits today. Drawing from oral history as well as archives, Reeling in the Queers brings even more to life the great big queer tapestry in Ireland.
Queer history in Ireland is Irish history and acknowledging and celebrating the light and the dark of it protects all of our futures as much as our pasts.
Ireland is home to some of the most dramatic and beautiful outdoor swimming spots in the world. Whether you are an experienced swimmer or just starting to discover the joy of wild dips, this comprehensive guide will inspire you to discover new locations for swimming, diving and snorkelling in dramatic bays and magical waterfalls, in secret coves and serene rivers and lakes. Here you will find expert tips, spectacular photos and practical information on parking, access and swimming conditions.
The maps, grid references and clear directions make it easy to find these locations where you can escape the crowds and take the plunge in some of the most awe-inspiring corners of Ireland’s landscape.
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, Manchán 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.
‘Here now I tell my story, showing my understanding, reaching out, being respected, so people can listen to my turmoiled world. My thoughts unfurled on each page of my life story.’
Fiacre Ryan’s story to this point is compelling. He was the first non-verbal autistic student to sit the Irish Leaving Cert, achieving honours marks in Maths, English & History.
Until the age of 13, Fiacre had no means of communicating with his family or the outside world. His family believed his non-verbal autism had effectively locked him out of an ability to engage, and their perception was that he was incapable of ‘learning’ beyond any basic form of communication.
Through the introduction of the ‘rapid prompting method’ (RPM), a tool designed to help autistic children communicate, Fiacre has subverted all prior perceived limitations of somebody with non-verbal autism. In the process he has unleashed his inner writer to devastatingly beautiful effect through his extraordinary and unique way of combining words and ideas in prose and poetry.
His writing is astonishing, independent from his autism. His poems address his daily experiences, while his commentary showcases his thoughts on the non-autistic world, on how those with autism are treated and his own personal ambitions and dreams for the future.
Children’s & Young Adult
This is a great gift for the readers in your life. The Seaside Books Gift Card can be used for online purchases.
The caravan was in a field behind a hedge.
And beyond the hedge was the sea. The caravan smelled old and damp. The caravan smelled like you were on holiday.
Eoin lives with his Nana, and every year they make their way to their caravan for the whole of the summer.
There Eoin has the freedom to go off with his friends for hours on end, and to roam the beach.
One day the waves come up really high - will they get through to the other side? A warm, cosy story full of laughter and adventure about one epic summer spent in a caravan. An homage to alternative families, based on the author's own childhood.
An epic tale of volcanoes, dragons and wild storms, with themes drawn from Irish legend. Written by the current Irish Children's Laureate, this is a celebration of the magic of bees and the power we can all draw from the natural world. Nestled on a peaceful island, Orla and her grandmother live tending their beloved bees.
But bubbling below is a monster waiting to surface – a dormant volcano – and when it wakes Orla and the rest of the island must flee in search of safety. Orla adventures across the wild sea, guided by her buzzing friends, to find a new home. But what will they find over the horizon?
A story of sisterhood, secrets and standing up for what you believe in from the award-winning author of The Little Bee Charmer of Henrietta Street and The Weather Girls.
It’s 1956. When thirteen-year-old bookworm Rosy Heron and her big sister Martha are sent to Dublin to help their aunt Toto in her busy bookshop for the summer, their quiet lives change overnight. The two sisters quickly become part of the Baggot Books team as junior booksellers and bicycle delivery girls.
But the bookshop is also full of secrets. Where does their aunt disappear to at night, and what exactly is happening in the basement of the shop? Rosy is determined to solve the mystery, but she’s not the only one interested in the goings-on in Baggot Books …
On a mysterious, foggy island, way out at sea, stands an upside-down lighthouse. Here, fish fly and birds swim. Stars shine during the day and waterfalls fall upwards!Come with Grandad and Meara to this topsy-turvy island full of wonders.
And share the magic of looking at the world upside-down!
When proud mermaid Muireann flees her climate-ravaged ocean in search of hope on land, she confronts human cruelty and body-shaming as she struggles to find her true home and voice. Caught between a dying ocean and a divided world, she must grapple between the sea that made her and the surface that might break her – in this stunning verse novel that reimagines The Little Mermaid.
Muireann is a mermaid – fierce, curious and proud of the body that keeps her warm beneath the waves. But life in the ocean is becoming impossible. The merfolk are at war with the human ramifications of climate change: food is scarce, and her twin sister has been killed in a mass-fishing net. With her mother lost in grief and her world falling apart, Muireann longs to escape to the surface to find some answers. But the human world isn’t the haven she hoped for. It’s colder, crueller – and here, her large body is seen not as strength, but as something to be ashamed of.
In this beautiful novel in verse, Muireann must find her voice and fight for where she belongs – whether that be beneath the waves, or above them.
A groundbreaking memoir about growing up mixed-race in Ireland, by the Irish Book Award-winning author and media personality Leon Diop.
Mixed-race experience in Ireland has never been described so honestly. Diop, a charismatic public figure and strong positive male role-model for young Irish people, tells his story from his first day as the only brown boy in school to his powerful recent experience reconnecting with his African roots in Senegal.
Growing up, Diop struggled with his identity, got into trouble, and lost his way, before turning his life around and finding his mission: helping Black and mixed-race Irish people tell their own stories. He founded Black & Irish and developed it into an advocacy group, a podcast with RTÉ, and an award-winning book (published by Little Island in 2023).
Now it is Diop’s turn to tell his own story, his journey from mixed-up kid to embracing his own identity, one that will inspire young Irish people and help counter dangerous political narratives in Ireland today.
This beautiful book is based on an autobiographical poem about a young boy sent away by his family to build a future abroad – to find a new and hopeful place to call home.
Told through the light and warmth of a lantern, this is a simple but beautiful story of love, family and resilience.
At a time when more Irish people are living around the world than at home in Ireland, and where many seek refuge on our island from across the globe, Dagogo’s own story holds echoes for us all.
Winner of the 2025 An Post Irish Book Awards' International Education Services Teen & YA Book of the Year
A lyrical YA verse novel about a teenager’s journey to heal from heartbreak, rediscover her inner strength, and find harmony again – perfect for readers who love emotional, empowering coming-of-age stories.
Daisy can feel like a solo act at home. On the outside of her twin brothers’ intense relationship, she leans towards her parents, particularly her father, for support. As a passionate classical musician, she is not wildly popular at school, but she has one close friend and a life filled with musical performance. Her life is turned upside down when her boyfriend suddenly breaks up with her, and Daisy is left disconnected from her one true love, music.
When she makes a new friend at school, mysterious Flora, Daisy finds a glimmer of peace in her chaotic life. Just as everything seems to be getting better, they all fall apart. Family tensions heighten as Daisy’s dad falls ill and Daisy needs to decide should she find her way back to who she was or look towards who she is going to become.
Norah Patten brings you on a journey high above the earth and into space. You will learn about space travel, astronaut training and life without gravity. A fun and engaging book about space and becoming an astronaut: but most importantly this book is about following your dreams no matter how big!
In the not-so-faraway land of Belfast city live Fluffy, Duffy and Scruffy, the three kid goats Gruff. One fine day, they decide to go to Botanic Gardens for a picnic. But will they get past the angry troll under the Albert Bridge and make it home in time for dinner? Join the trio on a fun-filled adventure as they visit Belfast’s best-loved locations.
Niamh lives in the magical land of Tír na nÓg, where no one ever grows old or feels sad. She invites Oisín to join her and they are happy until he misses his home in the human world. When sadness strikes, Niamh learns the strength and beauty of the human heart. A beautiful retelling of a beloved Irish legend.
Foxy loves his mother’s stories about the Wild Wood: about rabbits and badgers, squirrels and owls, and the tall, thin deer, with horns like tree branches. Foxy decides to set out on his own wild adventure. But can he be brave and cunning and quick enough to find his way back home?
The 10th Anniversary edition of The Wordsmith, a dystopian classic from Laureate na nÓg Patricia Forde
How many words do you need to survive?
Letta loves her job as the Wordsmith’s apprentice, giving out words to people that need them. It doesn’t strike her as odd that the people of Ark are only allowed to use a few hundred words, and words like “love”, “hope” and “freedom” are banned. When her master disappears, Letta begins to understand that all is not well, and that the leaders of Ark want to destroy language forever. It is up to her to stop them silencing what is left of the human race. But she is only a young girl, and they are the leaders of the known world …
Bestselling and multi-award winning, The Wordsmith imagines a future eerily similar to aspects of our present reality. With a freshly imagined cover and a new exclusive intro from the Laureate herself, this 10th anniversary edition is a classic for all the generations yet to come.
From the world of Fox & Son Tailers. ‘Badger Books’ is a bookshop, run by a badger. You can find books about every animal.
From bears to elephants, tigers to dinosaurs and pandas to narwhals. But there’s one book they don’t have ... and it’s one that Rory the Fox really, really wants.
A little birdie told me …There's going to be a party! All the birds are going, from the little robin to the graceful swan. There’ll be games, and dancing and cake – and someone very special is coming! Who could it be?
Can a place exist if it's not on a map? At school, Falasteen and her classmates are tasked with finding their families' home countries on a map, but no matter how hard she looks, Falasteen can't find Palestine. Confused, Falasteen turns to her family for answers. Her grandfather, grandmother and mama encourage her to see their homeland from a different perspective, and each of their stories helps her understand her people's history and her own place in the world.
Filled with beautiful, inspiring illustrations, this is a story of family, resilience and home always being where the heart is.
Nell is working as a scullery maid in the kitchen of the Big House.
Once she loved school and books and dreaming. But there's not much choice of work when the land grows food that rots in the earth. Now she is scrubbing, peeling, washing, sweeping for Sir Philip Wicken, the man who owns her home, her family's land, their crops, everything.
His dogs are always well fed, even as famine sets in. Upstairs in the Big House, where Nell is forbidden to enter, is Johnny Browning, newly arrived from England: the young nephew who will one day inherit it all. And as hunger and disease run rampant all around them, a spark of life and hope catches light when Nell and Johnny find each other.
This is a love story, and the story of a people being torn apart. This is a powerful and unforgettable novel from the phenomenally talented Sarah Crossan.
Covering historic and current figures from the worlds of the arts, sport, business, politics and social activism, Black and Irish will also find space to celebrate everyday heroes-lesser known figures making a difference in Irish communities today.
The Book Who Wanted to Be Loved is a heart-warming and thrilling tale about belonging, friendship and more. This debut by a duo of long-time book lovers celebrates the magic of bookshops, stories and books.
Our loveable hero lives in a bookshop. He is happy there, or at least he thinks he is. His pages are full of excitement, romance, daring deeds and adventure. But as he watches his friends being picked up by excited children, fawned over and carried away, he realises that what he wants most of all is to be loved. Taking matters into his own hands, he sets out on an epic journey of his own. Sneaking out of the bookshop he encounters many prospective friends, but none are quite right. Maybe the love he was seeking has been with him in the bookshop all along?
With beautiful illustrations throughout, The Book Who Wanted to Be Loved is sure to make your heart soar.
The city is wild, The city is free. The city has wonderful things to see ... Meet Lily and Tim, our brave adventurers. When they go into the city, with a Snap! a Clap! and a Zap! they can make the boring ...amazing!
Inspired to encourage children to ignore their devices and explore their outside environment, a fun and accessible story about finding the joy and wonder in the world around us. With bright, colourful artwork reminiscent of urban street art.
Discounted Books
Nell is working as a scullery maid in the kitchen of the Big House.
Once she loved school and books and dreaming. But there's not much choice of work when the land grows food that rots in the earth. Now she is scrubbing, peeling, washing, sweeping for Sir Philip Wicken, the man who owns her home, her family's land, their crops, everything.
His dogs are always well fed, even as famine sets in. Upstairs in the Big House, where Nell is forbidden to enter, is Johnny Browning, newly arrived from England: the young nephew who will one day inherit it all. And as hunger and disease run rampant all around them, a spark of life and hope catches light when Nell and Johnny find each other.
This is a love story, and the story of a people being torn apart. This is a powerful and unforgettable novel from the phenomenally talented Sarah Crossan.
New home, new name and newly thirty: Phoebe Forde has stepped into emigrant life in Copenhagen with her anxious dog, Dolly.
Almost three years into her gender transition, she has learned to move through the world carefully, savouring small moments of joy. A woman without a past can be anyone she wants - that is, until an unexpected visit from Grace, her first love, brings memories of Dublin and a life she thought she'd left behind. Over the course of a single weekend, as their old romance kindles something sweet and radically unfamiliar, Grace helps Phoebe to navigate the jagged edges of migration, nostalgia and hope.
On their arrival in Trieste in 1904, James Joyce left Norah Barnacle outside a railway station while he went to scare up money. He got embroiled in a fight with a couple of sailors and was locked up for his troubles. A penniless Norah was left alone for almost an entire day and night sitting on their suitcases at the station in a city where she knew no one and where she didn't speak the language.
In real life, Norah waited for him. This novel asks - what if she hadn't? In Penelope Unbound, one of our greatest living novelists weaves a spellbinding speculative history. By unhooking Norah from her famous husband, Morrissy gives her a compelling new voice, with heartbreak and humanity all her own.
Sensual, inventive and uproariously funny, Penelope Unbound reimagines a Joycean heroine for the 21st century.
1703, Kinsale, County Cork. Anne Coleman is the illegitimate child of a local lawyer and his maid; disguised as ‘Anthony’ to protect reputations, the mask suits Anne just fine. But, fixated on boats and the sea, she struggles to fit in, and her devoted mother fears for her fiercely independent and impulsive daughter.
When their secrets are exposed, the family emigrates to the new colony of Carolina, but this fresh start will bring devastating loss and stifling responsibilities. Lonely and transgressive, Anne finds comfort only with Bedelia, servant and intimate friend. But her craving for the sea-wandering life and a misjudged marriage to young Gabriel Bonny will compel Anne to take to the sea again, this time around the islands of the Caribbean, famous for plunder and piracy.
Adventure, passion and freedom await, but so do violence and disappointment. And, as she tries to stay true to herself, her hopes and her few precious friendships, Anne Bonny must also face her own privilege and the sacrifices required for enduring love.
Seaborne is the thrilling and sensuous portrait of a young woman out of step with her time and place, but never her heart.
Set in Dublin’s Liberties, Estelle Birdy’s explosively original debut Ravelling channels the energies and agonies of young men let loose in the city, their city, navigating the tumultuous trajectory of youth and young manhood, where they balance their hopes with the harsh realities of their present. Hurtling between friendships, feuds, drug-deals, family and brushes with the law, this is modern Dublin as never before portrayed. Ravelling follows Deano, a weed-smoking hurling star, living with his aunt in an about-to-be-demolished flat; Hamza, a Pakistani Muslim atheist and precocious academic, who sells his ADHD drugs to the kids in a private school; Oisín, empathetic and iron-willed, who has begun to see his dead brother at the end of his bed; Congolese nature lover, Benit, who just wants to relax and hurl with the lads; Karl, a maybe-gay fashionista, dreaming of something better while immersing himself in his art.
Bound by friendship, place and the memories of those who’ve died too soon, these young men grapple with race, class, sex, parties, poverty, violence and Garda harassment, all while wondering what it means to be a man in twenty-first century Ireland.
Winner of the Clarissa Luard Prize 2021. The poems of Some Integrity bring something new to the Irish lyric tradition. Queerness is a way of looking, a perspective, grounded in an awareness of the porous and provisional nature of our bodies. The book's social encounters and exchanges, its responses to the work of artists, its figures in a landscape, and its considerations of food and desire, work as capsule narratives and as an exhilarating extension of that lyric tradition.
In her debut collection, Rosamund Taylor dares us across thresholds and invites us to glimpse the world as we’ve never seen it before. She boldly charts a journey of survival and transformation with poems on history reimagined, astronomy, sorcery, wild landscapes, talismanic creatures, and queer love.
Taylor explores what it means to live in a female body that is not defined by lack, or want, or perpetual suffering, but is possessed by a real and defined sense of erotic autonomy.
These poems burn from the inside out with possibility, and there is magic, mystery and reclamation at every turn. In Her Jaws is a landmark debut that extends and deepens the Irish tradition of writing the female perspective, while also breaking new ground.
“it’s not very feminist to consider myself a mouldy slut
I’ve agency over my body and all that 21st-century shite”
A young woman wakes feeling raw and tender after a one-night stand. She leaves a strange man sleeping in her bed and goes running. Marked by the anxiety of living in a city that does not feel like home, she must face the memories and men kept under her bed.
Victoria Kennefick's daring first book, Eat or We Both Starve, draws readers into seemingly recognisable set-pieces - the family home, the shared meal, the rituals of historical occasions, desire - but Kennefick forges this material into new shapes, making them viable again for exploring what it is to live with the past - and not to be consumed by it.
Rebecca Goss writes: 'Victoria Kennefick writes with a fresh urgency, giving us poems that are honest and fearless. She once said: "Poetry has saved my life, made my life.
Reading and writing it have taught me bravery and discipline." Kennefick is unafraid to explore bereavement, sex and the female body in her poetry. She writes with a visceral originality. Her poems are rich with physical sensations.
She is able to find beauty in the big subjects like sorrow and desire, offering us the finest, most startling details. Her identity as a young Irish woman is hugely important to her, something she explores with intelligence and candour. I have always felt there is nothing Victoria could not tackle.
The scope in her work is exhilarating.'
When Hannah learns that famed chef Daniel Costello is facing accusations of sexual assault, she’s thrown back to the summer she spent waitressing at his high-end Dublin restaurant – the plush splendour of the dining rooms, the wild parties after service, the sizzling tension of the kitchens. But Hannah also remembers how the attention from Daniel soon morphed from kindness into something darker.
Now the restaurant is shuttered and Daniel is faced with the reality of a courtroom. His wife Julie is hiding from paparazzi lenses behind the bedroom curtains. Surrounded by the wreckage of the past, Daniel, Julie and Hannah are all forced to reconsider what happened at the restaurant. Their three different voices reveal a story of power and complicity, of the lies that we tell and the courage that it takes to face the truth.
‘Here now I tell my story, showing my understanding, reaching out, being respected, so people can listen to my turmoiled world. My thoughts unfurled on each page of my life story.’
Fiacre Ryan’s story to this point is compelling. He was the first non-verbal autistic student to sit the Irish Leaving Cert, achieving honours marks in Maths, English & History.
Until the age of 13, Fiacre had no means of communicating with his family or the outside world. His family believed his non-verbal autism had effectively locked him out of an ability to engage, and their perception was that he was incapable of ‘learning’ beyond any basic form of communication.
Through the introduction of the ‘rapid prompting method’ (RPM), a tool designed to help autistic children communicate, Fiacre has subverted all prior perceived limitations of somebody with non-verbal autism. In the process he has unleashed his inner writer to devastatingly beautiful effect through his extraordinary and unique way of combining words and ideas in prose and poetry.
His writing is astonishing, independent from his autism. His poems address his daily experiences, while his commentary showcases his thoughts on the non-autistic world, on how those with autism are treated and his own personal ambitions and dreams for the future.
In 1982, Nuala Malin struggles to stay connected, to her husband, to motherhood, to the smallness of her life in the belly of a place that is built on hate and stagnation. Her daughter Sam and baby son PJ keep her tethered to this life she doesn’t want. She finds unexpected refuge with a seventeen-year-old boy, but this relationship is only temporary, a sticking plaster on a festering wound. It cannot last and when her chance to leave Northern Ireland comes, Nuala takes it.
In 1994, Sam Malin plans escape. She longs for a life outside her dysfunctional family, far away from the North and all its troubles, free from her quiet brooding father Patsy, who never talks about her mother, Nuala; a woman Sam barely knew, who abandoned them twelve years ago. She finds solace in music, drugs and her best friend Becca, but most of all in an illicit relationship with a jagged, magnetic older man.
She is drawn to him, and he to her, in a way she can’t yet comprehend.
Sam is more like her mother than she knows.
New fiction by:
Suad Aldarra, Caleb Azumah Nelson, Jan Carson, Elaine Feeney, Oona Frawley, Sinéad Gleeson, Anna Jean Hughes, Caleb Klaces, Naomi Krüger, Henrietta McKervey, Paul McVeigh, Mary Morrissy, Nuala O'Connor, Chris Wright.
To live with dementia is to develop extraordinary and various new ways of being – linguistically, cognitively and practically. The storyteller operates similarly, using words and ideas creatively to reveal a slightly different perspective of the world.
In this anthology of fourteen new short stories, commissioned by Jan Carson and Jane Lugea, some of the best contemporary writers from Ireland and the UK powerfully and poignantly explore the depths and breadth of the real dementia experience, traversing age, ethnicity, class and gender, sex and consent. Each writer’s story is drawn from their own personal experience of dementia and told with outrageous and dark humour, empathy and startling insight. Here are heroes and villains, tricksters and saints, mothers, fathers, lovers, friends, characters whose past has overshadowed their present and characters who are making a huge impact on the world they currently find themselves in. They might have dementia, but dementia is only a small part of who they are. They will challenge, frustrate, inspire and humble you.
Above all, these brilliant pieces of short fiction disrupt the perceived notions of what dementia is and, in their diversity, honesty and authenticity begin to normalise an illness that affects so many and break down the stigma endured by those living with it every day.
Find out more about the AHRC-funded research project based at Queen's University Belfast, from which this anthology has emerged: www.blogs.qub.ac.uk/dementiafiction/
Secrets, desire, blood... It all comes out in the wash.
Ciara has it all - a loving husband, well-behaved children and an immaculate home.
But behind the filters, her reality is far from what it seems. Mishti is stuck in a loveless marriage, raising her daughter in a country that is too cold, among children who look nothing like her. Lauren is mostly happy, despite being judged for letting her kids run naked, wild and free.
Then Ciara is found murdered in her pristine home and suddenly everyone is a suspect. Hushed whispers, secret rendezvous and bloody betrayals . ..
Everyone has their dirty laundry, but this goes beyond gossip. This is all-out war.
A deliciously scandalous page-turner about the dark side of suburbia that peels back the layers of Ciara's insta-perfect life to reveal friendships gone rotten, manipulation masquerading as love and families riddled with lies . . .
Orpen has always been an outlier in Phoenix City – the only outsider ever admitted to the ranks of the banshees, the female warriors who enforce order, and protect it from the skrake – the ravening creatures that have laid waste to the rest of the country, and gather at the city walls.
Unrest is building in the city – a deadly sickness is spreading through the workers, while an unspoken disillusionment is creeping amongst the fighting women, weary of enforcing the all-male management’s patriarchal rule, and of the cost, to their sisters, and to young new recruits, of upholding this order.
Rumour has it that banshees have been taking matters into their own hands, and taking swift and violent revenge. When Orpen’s troop leader falls under suspicion it becomes clear that Orpen will need to muster all her courage and prowess if she and her fellow banshees are going to be able to find a way to escape, and rebuild a society worth fighting for.
This is a great gift for the readers in your life. The Seaside Books Gift Card can be used for online purchases.