Nonfiction

Oscar Wilde was one of Ireland's finest and most prolific 19th-century writers and a celebrated wit. He became a popular playwright in the early 1890s and is best remembered for...

As she turns 80, Mary O'Rourke writes a letter to 20 people, past and present, close and distant, living and deceased.To her beloved brother, Paddy ... to the Athlone Fianna...

'I think I bought a house', I said, still slightly stunned. I've spent longer choosing a tie.First, a dream of escaping the city ... and then a century-old cottage to...

Born in the Liberties of Dublin in 1910, Jim Branigan was, by his own admission, a shy, scrawny "sissy" as a lad. Cruelly beaten by bullies in the railway yard...

No. 1 BestsellerA successful property developer in England, the Sligo-born Tom Gilmartin had ambitious plans for major retail developments in Dublin in the late 1980s. Little did he know that...

Tony Ryan was one of the greatest Irishmen of the twentieth century.Ingenious, driven and sometimes reckless, his sheer spirit and adventurousness made him Ireland's Aviator. Born in a railwayman's cottage...

Jimmy Magee, whose extraordinary memory for sports trivia has led to his being dubbed the Memory Man, has the distinction of being the longest-serving sports commentator in the English-speaking world....

Looking back over the last six, almost seven decades, the images that flash through my mind are hardly believable - sometimes, it feels like I'm remembering someone else's life. The...

An Irish epic, The Maximalist documents in unflinching detail and with great subtlety the meteoric rise and slow unravelling of an Irish icon. 'Biography of the Year.' The Sunday Times'Biography...

An Irish epic, The Maximalist documents in unflinching detail and with great subtlety the meteoric rise and slow unravelling of an Irish icon. 'Biography of the Year.' The Sunday Times'Biography...

The Sunday Times Top Ten BestsellerSuzanne suffered five heart attacks and made it through open heart surgery. But even that pales in comparison to the horrors she faced as a...

Intensely private, possibly saintly, but perhaps misanthropic, Samuel Beckett was the most legendary and enigmatic of writers. Anthony Cronin's biography is a revelation of this mythical figure as fully human...

LONGLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2021'One of the year's funniest books' i Paper'Funny, smart, soulful and sometimes devastating ... It made me laugh and cry' EMILIE PINE, author of...

'A little gem of a book' Brendan O'ConnorTom Inglis and his Wheaten terrier Pepe have lived together for eighteen years: countless days of walks and play and the odd bit...

In the first authorized biography of W. B. Yeats for over 50 years, Roy Foster brings new light to one of the most complex and fascinating lives of the late...

Richard Ellmann has revised and expanded his definitive work on Joyce's life to include newly discovered primary material, including details of a failed love affair, a limerick about Samuel Beckett,...

Annie Caulfield's early years were spent by the seaside in Ireland. However, the family shifted to Sixties London and soon she wasn't sure who she was - was she English,...

Local rather than international, the dramas and privations described in this memoir are not the stuff of headlines. This is the story of an ordinary boy growing up in Belfast...

A memoir of growing up in New York in the 1930s and in Ireland in the 1940s. McCourt tells of extreme hardship and suffering, in Brooklyn tenements and Limerick slums...

'What I wanted was for Malachy Finegan to be exposed. I felt that the wee boy I had been might be stepping from the darkness, and I needed him to...

'Are you going into town today?' she says, which annoys me because it's something she says all the time, having forgotten she said it before, and I say, 'Jesus, Mum,...

'As skilful, stylish and pacy as one would expect from so adept a novelist' Sunday TelegraphEdna O'Brien depicts James Joyce as a man hammered by Church, State and family, yet...

'I took you because you were the most fearless.' AUGUST STRINDBERG TO ALBERT BONNIER, 1884.In 1835, a fifteen-year-old boy, the son of a Jewish bookseller, arrived in Stockholm from Copenhagen....

Uranus is the coldest planet in the solar system, a frozen giant named after a Greek deity. It is also the inspiration for Uranism, a concept coined by the writer...

The extraordinary autobiography of novelist Marina Jarre, tracing her identity and relationships through a turbulent era of European history. 'Beautifully ingenious' Vivian Gornick 'Her masterwork' New York Times 'Rich and...

When we spend so much of our time immersed in books, who's to say where reading ends and living begins? The two are impossibly and gloriously wedded, as Hill shows...

"A unique perspective on one of the most infamous cities in recent American history." - Publisher's Weekly"A book that sticks with you long after you've read it." Volume 1 Brooklyn"Hoke's...

I am no good at letters. John McGahern, 1963John McGahern is consistently hailed as one of the finest Irish writers since James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.This volume collects some of...

'Priestdaddy caused a sensation when it hit bookshelves in 2017' Vogue 'Glorious' Sunday Times'Laugh-out-loud funny' The Times'Extraordinary' Observer'Exceptional' Telegraph'Electric' New York Times'Snort-out-loud' Financial Times'Dazzling' Guardian'Do yourself a favour and read...

At the start of the twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a series of letters to a young officer cadet, advising him on writing, love, sex, suffering and the nature...

Winner of the An Post Irish Sports Book of the Year AwardLonglisted for The William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award'Not only the sports book of the year, the...

"In the autumn month of September, eighteen hundred and fifty-seven... two idle apprentices, exhausted by the long, hot summer, and the long, hot work it had brought with it, ran...

'An exuberant, breathless sprint through London in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies... It's bright, boisterous and extremely funny' TatlerIf Fielding's Tom Jones were alive in postwar England he might be...

John Buchan's name is known across the world for The Thirty-Nine Steps. In the past hundred years the classic thriller has never been out of print and has inspired numerous...

To look at Martin McGuinness' life is to follow Northern Ireland's own transition from conflict to peace. Martin McGuinness: A Life Remembered tells the remarkable story of McGuinness' journey from...

The definitive story of Harry Boland, the ardent and prominent Republican, loyal confidant to de Valera and close friend and, later, love rival to Michael Collins for the heart of...

Tomas O'Crohan was born on the Great Blasket Island in 1865 and died there in 1937, a great master of his native Irish. He shared to the full the perilous...

Duine de sharscealaithe na GaeilgeIn Eanair 1952, se bliana sula bhfuair Peig Sayers bas, thionscain Coimisiun Bealoideasa Eireann agallaimh lei agus i in ospideal Naomh Anna, Baile Atha Cliath. Bhi...

'Ach cerbh i Peig Sayers?'Niorbh i in aon chor an tseanbhean ologonach i ar chuir na glunta de dhaltai scoile aithne uirthi. Is leir o chuntais uathu siud arbh eol...

The Irish nana is a repository of family history, memory and lore. Sometimes, like the Italian nonna, she is also a 'walking cookbook', carrying the old knowledge of how things...

Every time I write about my heart, I write about walking. Every time I write about walking, I write about my heart. What is it like to be born with...

Solace is that feeling of calm and comfort, that sense of peace that is all around us when we are open to finding it.Writer and photographer Catherine Drea explores the...

'On Skellig Michael, thousands of birds appear and disappear, erecting towers, coming together in wings of movement which build and unravel over the empty sea. Often, no one else is...

'In these strange days Michael Harding's route taking and wise words gently nudge us towards the future, steadying us as we navigate the great unknowns ahead' Joe Duffy The bestselling...