Irish Biography

As a young man, James Joyce rejected his country and its religion, but went on to recreate the Dublin of his youth in his fiction. "Ulysses" was initially banned in...

The last King of the Great Blasket Island was Padraig O Cathain, known as Peats Mhici, who served for quarter of a century until his death in 1929. The King...

Eden Halt describes a childhood spent on a remote coast of Northern Ireland, in the shadow of the Second World War. With his father absent in the African campaign, a...

This superb account of life on the Great Blasket Island off the west coast of Kerry, written as the nineteenth century draws to its close and the dawn of a...

Bizarre tales of murder and investigation in the drumlins, valleys and towns of Monaghan in the nineteenth century, based upon a casebook just recently discovered that has never been lodged...

From the author of the million-selling Angela's Ashes - the most keenly anticipated sequel of the decade Angela's Ashes was a publishing phenomenon. Frank McCourt's critically acclaimed, lyrical memoir of...

Music and Mayhem charts the immersive and explosive life of one of Ireland's most important musicians, and the golden decade of Irish music he was at the very centre of....

Turtle Was Gone a Long Time: Horsehead Nebula Neighing, the second volume of a remarkable trilogy, continues John Moriarty's spiritual journey embarked upon in Crossing the Kedron. In a Prelude...

In a letter to his friend Charles Ford, Jonathan Swift wrote: 'I have finished my travells and I am now transcribing them: they are admirable things and will wonderfully mend...

The Irish actor Donal McCann is probably best remembered by U.S. audiences from film performances he gave in John Huston's The Dead or Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty, or perhaps his performance...

Agnes Bernelle, one of Ireland's best-loved stage performers, was born Agnes Bernauer in Berlin in 1923, the daughter of a renowned Jewish-Hungarian theatre impresario. In this sparkling, intimate memoir she...

In We Have a Good Time...Don't We? Maeve Higgins, comedian and lady, smashes the brittle veneer on the creme brulee of life and hands around spoons, so we can all...

Peter Somerville-Large grew up with his brother Phil in a nursery world at the top of a smart house in Dublin from where they could watch Fitzwilliam Place far below,...

'I promised that I would one day write a book and tell the world about the home for unmarried mothers. I have at last kept my promise.'In Ireland, 1951, the...

Gander at The Gate is the story of a rural Irish childhood in Knocknagoshel, Kerry, in the thirties. Through the eyes of a son of the local schoolmaster, this beautifully...

An entertaining memoir of a rollicking life in New York of an Irish immigrant. The title is derived from the young Malachy's mishearing of the words 'amongst women' in Hail...

This edition marks the centenary of Oscar Wilde's death, and is the most complete ever to appear. It contains over 1500 of his letters, and anyone unfamiliar with Wilde as...

As an Irish Catholic raised in Leicester, fresh from University College Dublin with a first in History, Kevin Myers is sent north to work for the Belfast bureau of RTE...

'Without doubt, it's the memoir of the year' Irish IndependentPassionate, gossipy, opinionated and seriously entertaining, Truly Frank is an instant classic of journalistic memoir. Journalist Frank McDonald is best known...

Very funny, quirky and touching, A Single Headstrong Heart describes in a first-person narrative the author's childhood up to the early years of his career as a journalist and his...

Accidentally buying a derelict 22-room villa in the Italian countryside? What could possibly go wrong?When Rosie Meleady's landlady doubles her rent in cold, wet, overpriced Ireland, she packs up her...

This is the first paperback edition of Antoinette Quinn's acclaimed biography of Patrick Kavanagh, the most important Irish poet between the death of Yeats and the rise of Heaney.From the...

Wilde the writer is known to us from his plays and prose fiction, but apparently it was in his conversation that his genius reached its summit. His talk is lost...