Irish Biography

No British statesman of the nineteenth century reached the same level of international fame as Lord Castlereagh, or won as much respect from the great powers of Europe or America....

This volume, a reissue of the 1990 edition of Jeffares's biography of Yeats, with a new introduction and bibliography, is an account of Yeats's life and work. It features a...

Patrick Deeley's train journey home to rural East Galway in autumn 1978 was a pilgrimage of grief: his giant of a father had been felled, the hurley-making workshop silenced. From...

Traumatised by a terrible event in her childhood, Carla van Raay entered a convent at the age of eighteen. Expecting to find understanding and inner peace amongst her fellow nuns,...

We do not die alone - that's the remarkable conclusion of We'll Meet Again, an extraordinary new book by Colm Keane examining deathbed visions. The book recounts how dead parents,...

In her hilarious debut, Maeve Higgins smashes the brittle veneer on the creme brulee of life and hands around spoons, so we can all taste the delicious absurdity that lies...

In 1989, driven by a dream and the memory of her own past, Christina Noble travelled 6,000 miles to Vietnam, a country of great beauty where the terrible legacy of...

Uncovering the hidden love triangle between novelist Elizabeth Bowen and the author's grandparents - the critically acclaimed biography with never-before-seen letters detailing the affair.For readers who were swept up in...

The behind-the-scenes story of an innocent man, arrested and imprisoned in Iran and finally released after 222 daysBernard Phelan was working for an Iranian tour operator when he was arrested...

In fact, two places called home ...For over sixty years, Alice Taylor has lived in the village of Innishannon, the gateway to West Cork. But her childhood was spent on...

This entertaining and lively memoir describes the characters, landscapes and formative events during Ireland's remarkable late twentieth century renaissance. Starting with a nostalgic reflection on his upbringing in a historically...

When seventy-year-old Maura Murphy discovered she had cancer, she left her husband of fifty years and started writing her memoirs. Born 'chronically ugly and as cross as a briar' into...

Cry Salty Tears is the tale of a mother's survival and eventual triumph over almost unbelievable domestic hardship. Not only did Dinah O'Dowd face the harsh and unforgiving elements of...

Joyce, June and Paula Kavanagh were three sisters born to a family of ten in Ballyfermot, Dublin in the 1960s. Their father abused all three of them in the family...

'He planted his big arms on the bed on either side of me, and I wanted him to take control - I wanted him to be the boss...'Katie Collins went...

What happens when history tries to squeeze itself into a town of ten thousand people, most of them related somewhere down the line? For Glenn Patterson's grandparents, Jack and Kate,...

As the eldest of The Nolan Sisters, Anne Nolan's life appeared from the outside to be one of boundless excitement and glamour - a dream come true for any young...

Exploring the complexity of identity labels through memoir with warmth, insight and signature humour, considering how we might figure out who the hell we are in a world so eager...

Martha is now in her thirties. Her daughter has left home and she is lonely and vulnerable. The hard knocks have taken their toll on her health, and as she...

When Kay O'Gorman started writing this book, every word she put down was infused with shame and guilt. How could this devoted mother, whose whole world was her family, have...

For every woman who's ever looked in the mirror and felt crap: a funny, filthy and uplifting account of one woman's quest to leave body insecurity behind.Jules Coll was a...

In this biography of W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) the author shows him through a life of tumultuous creativity through which he strove to bring new meaning to poetry, vision and politics....

'I was about 10 feet away when a soldier fired the rubber bullet that struck me on the bridge of my nose. I didn't hear the bang of the discharge....

Born in Dublin in 1917 to politically active parents, Maeve Brennan's childhood in Ireland was moulded by the cultural ideologies of nationalism and lit by the creative energy of the...

At the heart of Once Upon a Hill are the author's grandparents, Jack and Kate, whose sedate old age belies the turmoil of their early life together, and apart -...

This autobiography, a sequel to Nostos, concludes the story of John Moriarty's life in Connemara during the 1980s and subsequent return to his native Kerry. He writes with compelling detail...

If the past is another country - what happens when we revisit it, one day a year?Carlo Gebler has done just that. Here is the story of Ireland - from...