Secondhand Irish Biography Books

Leo Varadkar shares his fascinating experience as Irish prime minister ata time of much change and turbulence, in this remarkably honestmemoir.Leo Varadkar was an unlikely Taoiseach – the youngest on...

'We hadn't a clue 'til we got the telly and then we wanted to be like Dallas. We were never happy, that we knew of. We were always longing for...

"Sweeney's prose is on fire. A blistering book that readers will relish enormously." MICHAEL HARDING"A cracking read ... a championship season as redemption song." MICHAEL CLIFFORD"All the tension of a...

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...

For many of its participants, the Second World War was the most intense period of their lives - with horizons widened by grief, strangeness and excitement. Peter Ross, graduated from...

Claire Walsh spent her twenties living the life she thought she was supposed to live, all the while playing hide and seek with depression. As a result, the road to...

McCourt's Pulitzer Prize winning look back at his childhood. "It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while..." Angela's Ashes is Frank McCourt's sad,...

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...

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

For once, these men are the objects; I am the subject. Me, me, me.Rosemary Mac Cabe was always a serial monogamist - never happier than when she was in a...

Desmond Doyle, 29 a painter and decorator, is married with six children and living in the infamous Fatima Mansions in Dublin in 1953. One day he comes home to find...

Nobody thought Rory O'Connor would make it - written off as 'thick' at school he struggled to find a career he felt he could succeed in. When a hot tip...

Angela Collins O'Mahony came from a small farming background and originally worked as a secretary for a steeplejack company. One day she was sent to a site to deliver materials...

When Rory Cowan stepped down from the role of Rory in Mrs Brown's Boys after 15 years, it made national headlines. Here, in his unique voice, the much-loved entertainer tells...

Green fields surrounded St Mary's National School at the foot of Three Rock Mountain in County Dublin in the 1930s. The author, as a boy, went from the little playground...

American or Irish, Republican or Democrat: many people are one or the other, but Larry Donnelly has been all of them. Born into an Irish American political dynasty, Larry was...

Aesthete, dandy, poet, dramatist and philosopher Oscar Wilde's wit and charm dazzled society in London, America and Paris in the late 1880s. But the year 1895 brought Wilde literary triumph...

After more than three years of suffering from Alzheimer's disease, the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch died in January 1999. Early that month she was taken to a home for...

Born and bred in the tough inner city slums of Summerhill in Dublin, Bill Cullen was one of fourteen children. A street seller from the age of six, Bill left...

The Number One Irish bestseller and 2014 Irish Book Award-winner, this is the searingly moving and empowering story of Majella O'Donnell, wife of Irish singer Daniel O'Donnell. It begins with...

His devoted uncle, an expert boatman and fisherman, raised and introduced Martin Quigley to trout and salmon angling, and to life, in their backyard river at the shaping age of...

This fascinating memoir traces one man's experiences of priesthood in Ireland over half a century from formation in the late 1940s and early 1950s, to ordination in 1956, through doctoral...

'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...

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...

THE IRISH TIMES NO. 1 BESTSELLERAN POST BIOGRAPHY OF THE YEAR'Gorgeous' Pandora Sykes'A rare and beautiful book' Marian Keyes'Tender, sad and side-splittingly funny' Annie MacManus'A delight' Dara O BriainSeamas O'Reilly's...