Kirjahaku

The first collection of plays from one of Ireland's most accomplished contemporary writers This volume contains four plays: The Lament for Arthur Cleary: "Theatrically rich and socially powerful, it takes on the lineaments of an epic voyage, a voyage into the dark heart of a city where Irish theatre has seldom been before" (Irish Times); In High Germany: "Thoughtful, comic, sad and provocative, this monologue of a lost and altered heritage ...These two plays [In High Germany and The Holy Ground] are cogent manifestations of a changing Irish world" (Irish Times); The Holy Ground: "A tour de force. It's stream of consciousness theatre at its best ...[which] develops a pace until the listener is hanging on to every syllable" (Sunday Press); Blinded by the Light: "Manically madcap and hilariously funny, it canters in a bawdy romp onto the stage, heralding the arrival of a unique comic writing talent. Energetic, perfectly timed and brilliantly observed" (Irish Press)"A writer of frenetic energy and imagination." (Sunday Times)

A marriage and a family reach breaking point on an annual holiday in the loveliest hotel in Ireland.

A stunning historical saga set in the early decades of the twentieth century which follows the lives and loves of one extraordinary family. We first meet the Goold Verschoyle children in 1915. Though there is a war going on in the world outside, they seem hardly touched by it – midnight swims, flower fairies and regatta parties form the backdrop to their enchanted childhood. But as they grow older, changes within Ireland and the wider world encroach upon the family’s private paradise. Turbulent times – the Irish war of independence, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II – are woven into the tapestry upon which this magical story is spun. Events in Spain, Russia and London draw the children in different directions: one travels to Moscow to witness Communism at first had; another runs away to England to take part in the General Strike and then heads off to the Civil War in Spain; another follows the more conventional route of marriage and family. Based upon the extraordinary lives of a real-life Anglo-Irish family, Bolger’s novel superbly recreates a family in flux, driven by idealism, wracked by argument and united by love and the vivid memories of childhood. ‘The Family on Paradise Pier’ shows Bolger at the height of his powers as a master storyteller. A spellbinding and magnificent achievement.

When Francis Hanrahan, the shy child of grey suburbia meets Shay, an older, wilder image of himself, he is cast out into the night-time world of Dublin. This is the story of a young boy's struggle towards maturity, set against a shocking image of Ireland, a tough urban landscape not a rural Eden.

From one of Ireland's bestselling writers, a literary thriller set in London and Dublin.

A year has passed since the closing of Finbar's Hotel, a down-on-its-heels hotel on the Dublin quays. Now, with a rock star as its new owner, it has once more opened its doors-and Finbar's has become an ultra-chic gathering spot. Ladies' Night at Finbar's Hotel describes one night in its newly illustrious surroundings-a night filled with adventure and comic romp. In one room a man surreptitiously helps his wife's friend get pregnant, while next door a businesswoman battles her father. And down the hall, a nun struggles with the most important mission of her life. A fabulous mix of pathos and high humor, this is a sardonic tour of the gamut of human experience told by Ireland's finest modern storytellers. Maeve Binchy has written numerous bestsellers, most recently Tara Road. Dermot Bolger is the author of six novels and edited The Vintage Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction. Clare Boylan has written six novels and several nonfiction works, including The Literary Companion to Cats. Emma Donoghue is the author of Stirfry and Kissing the Witch, among other works. Anne Haverty's writing has been short-listed for the Whitbread Award. ƒilis N' Dhuibhne has published poetry, short fiction, children's books, and two novels. Kate O'Riordan writes for stage and screen, and has written two novels including The Bray House. Deirdre Purcell recently adapted her novel Falling for a Dancer as a four-part serial for BBC television.

An ordinary man is forced to confront both his own demons and the manifestation of the supernatural beyond his comprehension and control Jeremy Furlong is a successful businessman, whose life has been carefully constructed from layer upon layer of lies. That is until now, when he is confronted by the trapped poltergeist spirit of a dead boy in the squalid flat he using to have an affair. The Passion of Jerome premiered at the Peacock stage of the Abbey Theatre in February 1999."A writer of frenetic energy and imagination." (Sunday Times)

This dazzling anthology, edited and introduced by Dermot Bolger, is a splendidly comprehensive and up-to-the-minute collection of the finest recent fiction from a nation of master storytellers. This collection of astonishing breadth reveals a literature of genuine global stature, as ancient as the Irish Sea. Contributors and stories include: John Banville, from Mefisto; Leland Bardwell, "The Hairdresser"; Sebastian Barry, from The Engine of Owl-Light; Mary Beckett, "Heaven"; Samuel Beckett, "For to End Yet Again"; Sara Berkeley, "The Sky's Gone Out"; Dermot Bolger, "The Journey Home"; Claire Boylan, "Villa Marta"; Shane Connaughton, "Ojus"; Mary Dorcey, "The Husband"; Roddy Doyle, from The Snapper; Anne Enright, "Men and Angels"; Hugo Hamilton, from Surrogate City; Dermot Healy, "The Death of Matti Bonner"; Aidan Higgins, from Balcony of Europe; Desmond Hogan, from A Curious Street; Jennifer Johnston, from The Christmas Tree; Neil Jordan, "Last Rights"; Molly Kean, Patrick McCabe, from The Butcher Boy; Brian Moore, "The Sight"; Edna O'Brien, "What a Sky"; William Trevor, "The Ballroom of Romance"; Val Mulkerns, "Memory and Desire"; Robert McLiam Wilson, from Ripley Bogle, and many more.

Each story stands alone but also makes up the vivid picture of life in Dublin's newly refurbished Finbar's Hotel . . . funny and poignant' Sunday Mirror 'Finbar's Hotel is back, this time with a stellar cast of women writers and a lick of paint . . . But what's it all about? Well, it would be all too easy to give the game away, so let's just say that there's a hilarious reworking of the old immaculate conception theme, a bittersweet confrontation between a daughter and her loopy father, a poignant encounter involving a long-married couple, and a cracking finish . . . it doesn't matter who wrote what: together they've produced a playful, light, highly entertaining book' Irish Times 'Beneath the humour, whimsy and outright craziness, Ladies' Night at Finbar's Hotel hits at the shallowness of current social pretensions and offers a cautious optimism about women's lives today' Times Literary Supplement

Leopold Bloom’s odyssey is a pandemonium of live music, puppets, dancing, clowning, bowler hats and kazoos. It’s Ulysses as you’ve never imagined it before, a superbly theatrical homage to Joyce’s chronicle of Dublin life and the greatest novel of all time. With his wife Molly waiting in bed for the nefarious Blazes Boylan, Leopold Bloom traverses Dublin, conversing in pubs, graveyards and brothels, enduring ridicule and prejudice as he steadfastly clings to his principles and subtly slays his dragons while drawing ever closer to his fateful encounter with the young Stephen Dedalus.

An intimate human study and subtle portrait of a country in flux from New Island author Dermot Bolger. While a floundering Irish government clings to its illusion of power as an international troika waits in the wings, Martin, a mid-ranking civil servant, finds himself alone in a Beijing hotel: a superfluous accessory in a delegation accompanying a Minister to China. A cat-and-mouse encounter with a Chinese masseuse draws Martin into a world beyond his experience, forcing him to confront the gap between the chameleon face of someone at work and the reality when everything is stripped bare, with nowhere left to hide from the anxieties, longings and contradictions in his head. The Fall of Ireland is a subtle meditation on the thin line between illusion and actuality: a study of a homesick man in the gilded cage of a luxury hotel, trying to unravel which elements of his life are real and which are subconscious deceptions.

A widow spends weeks haunting a cemetery, desperate to track down an unknown woman who keeps leaving flowers on her husband’s grave; A daughter searches a foreign city for her father, trying to understand why he disappeared forty-five years ago; A former gay lover of Roger Casement stands among the crowds at his state funeral in 1965, paying silent homage to the closeted world they were forced to inhabit at the dawning of the Irish State. A writer at a book launch comes face to face with the person secretly responsible for his success. In his first collection of short stories, Dermot Bolger peers under the veneer of our lives, exploring the secrets that bind families together, or tear them apart, creating worlds where people find that nothing is truly certain. There are always truths just beyond reach that would make sense of their lives, if they only know how to unlock them.

'Myles Foley gripped my soaked jumper. Before his ship sank he was a Nazi: now he's a drowning sailor. Out here, we are all sailors. Your father and grandfather understood that. Are you going to disgrace their memory?' Part historical fiction, part extraordinary coming-of-age tale, The Lonely Sea and Sky charts the maiden voyage of fourteen-year-old Jack Roche aboard a tiny Wexford ship, the Kerlogue, on a treacherous wartime journey to Portugal. After his father's ship is sunk on this same route, Jack must go to sea to support his family swapping Wexford's small streets for Lisbon's vibrant boulevards: where every foreigner seems to be a refugee or a spy, and where he falls under the spell of Katerina, a Czech girl surviving on her wits. Bolger's new novel is based on a real-life rescue in 1943, when the Kerlogue's crew risked their lives to save 168 drowning German sailors - members of the navy that had killed Jack's father. Forced to choose who to save and who to leave behind, the Kerlogue grows so dangerously overloaded that no one knows if they will survive amid the massive Biscay waves. A brilliant portrayal of those unarmed Irish ships that sailed alone through hazardous waters; of young romance and a boy encountering a world where every experience is intense and dangerous, this is Bolger's most spellbinding novel, and the work of a master storyteller who is one of Ireland's best-known novelists, playwrights and poets.

Every night during a year spent in lockdown, Dermot Bolger set out on long walks through deserted streets, armed only with a pen and paper. Bolger follows in the footsteps of the great Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa, using walks through his native city to allow his imagination free rein to revisit pivotal moments in his own life and speculatively meditate on the lives of others in a series of remarkable poems. The book starts with his parents honeymooning in a wartime Wicklow orchard and ends, eight decades later, as the poet dances with his partner in a Wicklow field. In between we encounter Nuala O’Faolain on a bicycle on Brooklyn Bridge; Grace Gifford Plunkett, defiant in her lonely final years; Herbert Simms, Dublin’s brilliant, tragically overworked housing architect; and Patricia Lynch, writing The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey in one room while her husband wrote communist tracts in the next. Interlaced with such real lives are imagined ones – a hardened criminal detailing prison life in haikus, a doppelganger exploring alternative pasts for the author. Taken together, these poems chart a dazzling constellation of experiences.

Following a car crash, for several seconds Dublin photographer Sean Blake is clinically dead but finds his progress towards the afterworld blocked by a haunting face he only partially recognises. Restored to a miraculous second chance at life – he feels profoundly changed. He is haunted by not knowing who he truly is because this is not the first time he has been given a second life. At six weeks old he was taken from his birth mother, a young girl forced to give him up for adoption. Now he knows that until he unlocks the truth about his origins, he will be a stranger to his wife, to his children and to himself. Struggling against a wall of official silence and a complex sense of guilt, Sean determines to find his birth mother, embarking on an absorbing journey into archives, memories, dreams and startling confessions. The first modern novel to address the scandal of Irish Magdalene laundries when it was published in 1994, A Second Life continued to haunt Bolger’s imagination. He has never allowed its republication until he felt ready to retell the story in a new and even more compelling way. This reimagined text is therefore neither an old novel nor a new one, but a completely ‘renewed’ novel, that grows towards a spelling-binding, profoundly moving conclusion.

Hidden behind the walls of Grangegorman Mental Hospital in 1941, four lives collide, all afflicted by the human cost of wars, betrayals and trauma. Gus, a shrewd attendant, is the keeper of everyone’s secrets, especially his own. Two War of Independence veterans are reunited. One, Jimmy Nolan, has spent twenty years as a psychiatric patient, unable to recover from his involvement in youthful killings. In contrast, Francis Dillon has prospered as a businessman, until rumours of Civil War atrocities cause his collapse, suffering delusions of enemies seeking to kill him. Doctor Fairfax has fled London after his gay lover’s death. Desperate to rekindle a sense of purpose, Fairfax tries to help Dillon recover by getting him to talk about his past. But a code of silence surrounds the traumatic violence Ireland has endured. Is Dillon willing to break his silence to find a way back to his family? In this superb evocation of hidden worlds, master storyteller Dermot Bolger explores the aftershock within people who participate in violence and the fault-lines in all post-conflict societies only held together by collective amnesia.

Life moves forward, but its meaning often emerges in hindsight. In this luminous collection, Dermot Bolger captures those unexpected moments when past loves and choices resurface with startling clarity. These stories explore ageing, memory, and the lingering imprint of first encounters - how joy, loss, and betrayal echo across decades. A man searches for a secret half-sister to understand his father. A woman is haunted by a boy’s death fifty years ago. A lighthouse keeper recalls his first love. A public figure, slipping into dementia, relives one fateful night. From childhood holidays shadowed by tragedy to chance reunions that rewrite old narratives, Bolger’s characters wrestle with Yeats’s 'rag and bone shop of the heart', revealing the fragile beauty of human connection.