Kirjahaku

It’s Ireland in the 1950s and they’re both running away, Curly from failure as a dancer in New York and Mary from the utter boredom of Ballymalloy in the West of Ireland. Mary is seduced by his flashy car, his collection of great swing music and his style on and off the dance floor. She succumbs and to atone for the inevitable shame he has caused her, he has to give her the only thing she wants – entry into the unforgiving world he thought he’d left forever. He trains her as a jazz dancer and enters her into a competition that offers her a ticket out of town. The book probes the lives of several inhabitants of Ballymalloy and reveals some funny desires, efforts and strivings. It also probes some horrifying goings on in the workhouses and the industrial schools to which were sent thousands of unwanted children by the church and the religious orders over the decades. Details of these tragic and often fatal stories are still emerging in modern Ireland. However, this story is set in a less complicated time, when America felt good about itself and was admired all over Western Europe. When American technology was supreme and when jazz and bop ruled the world.

What Major John MacBride learns when leading the Irish Brigade in the Second Anglo-Boer War against the British Empire isn't much help when fighting his estranged wife in the French courts.

Searching for a place in nature in which he could call his own, Dermod Judge found his healing place - a place that he could find a respite from the quotidian pressures of life. In this book, Dermod reveals a unique insight into many aspects of the human condition, demonstrated by examples of writers, artists, architects and naturalists who, throughout the ages, endeavoured to change things for the better. Along the way, the book delves into the aspects of life which, all too often, need healing. From sin to unnatural divisions foisted on the world; from the scarcity of water to intimidating cathedrals, from the challenges of white-water canoeing to the vicissitudes of cooking a full breakfast on an open fire, without breaking the eggs. There is more than one healing place in every life. You just have to find it...

Jack Gillcrest is a skilful painter who succumbs to the dangerous attractions of art forgery, descending through increasingly challenging fakes to an active role in the art heist of the century.

This book is about the dangers of storytelling. When writer Pat Quinn decides to document the violent history of the gangs in his city, he intends to disguise it as fiction. This is to afford ‘deniability’ to the still living gang bosses who enjoy being interviewed about their ‘heroic’ past but who are wary of legal repercussions. To write the history for a weekly newspaper column and to involve his readers, he creates a character called Tom Brown to be both the interviewer of the gang bosses and a participant in the described activities of long ago. This merging of make believe and truth, of myth and legend, of the real and the imagined, of the past and the present is further complicated when an emboldened Tom Brown starts to impinge on Pat’s life in uncomfortable ways. The gangs’ histories impact more and more on Pat when he and Tom Brown start to be blamed for past atrocities. He loses his girlfriend, his equanimity and almost his sanity when he begins to suspect that Tom Brown may not, indeed, be fictional.

Great loves, great theatre roles and great betrayals. Michael Driscoll, the finest actor of his generation, is tempted by magnificent roles and manipulated when he accepts them. He reaches the dizzy international heights before his Faustian bargain catches up with him.

A modern author, a member of a wealthy family, a decadent dynasty, a re-established king and a disillusioned knight look for meaning in the murderous tumult of medieval Europe. The contemporary writer featured in the tale is commissioned to turn the century-spanning dairies of the noble Novak family into a book. To do so, he has to plumb the depths of debauchery, corruption and brutal wars in a medieval society that is struggling to define itself. He then falls in love with a noble woman and sees her killed by a villainous lordling. His revenge is horrendous, and his subsequent mysterious death is wrapped up in his fatal return to the East in search of the strange, unearthly woman of long ago.

Photography has long been used to capture events. His finest photograph was to cause them. When Derek takes an intimate photograph of his first love, he sets a sequence of events in motion that threatens them both. When he displays the photograph in public, she loses her freedom and he stands to lose the love of his life. Kidnapped by an extremist group, she faces a forced marriage and total denial of the lifestyle in which she thrives. To rescue her and redeem himself, Derek has to form an alliance with an unlikely source – the handsome rival for her love.