Secondhand Irish Biography Books

'An unforgettable, freewheeling masterclass'MICHAEL MAGEE, Nero Book Award-winning author of Close to Home'Funny, nerve-wracking and utterly compelling'COLIN BARRETT, Booker Prize-longlisted author of Wild Houses'Extraordinary... A writer with a rare gift....

A beautiful and hopeful book for when life isn't what you expect it to be.In March 2017, Niamh Fitzpatrick's life fell apart overnight. Her beloved sister Dara was killed in...

A hilarious and heartwarming dive into the hyperactive life of Vogue Williams - TV Presenter and Podcaster. Big Mouth is the perfect name for my book. Everyone is known for...

In a memoir of staggering power and candour, award-winning journalist Fergal Keane addresses his experience of wars of different kinds, some very public and others acutely personal. During his years...

This autobiography describes the first ten years of the life of Christy Kenneally, a working-class Cork northsider who lost his mother when he was five years old. The book captures...

Shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize 2019'[A] painfully intense, courageous and gripping account of [Fanning's] journey to the underworld of madness and back. This is a brave and instructive book.'...

Her addiction to the drug took her to a place about as low as a person can go. She had grown up in Ballymun and had, like many others, succumbed...

This is the first volume of the authorized three-volume life of George Bernard Shaw, the playwright, wit, socialist, vegetarian and polemicist. It covers the first 41 years of his life,...

Today was his first climb to the top. He knew if he was there, watching, then she would never leave him. Her name was Bernadette and he climbed the shed...

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...

'Good Times and Bad' recalls Seamus Martin's colourful life and tells fascinating stories about his childhood in a working class family. They moved house frequently from Dublin to Derry to...

The definitive inside account of the 2016-20 coalition government.Cabinet minister Shane Ross reveals the bitter internal battles fought with the old Blueshirts, the crises when the coalition came close to...

The Number One Bestseller______________For over thirty years, David McDonald worked in Ireland's biggest prisons. This is his story.As a young officer, McDonald got a baptism of fire in Mountjoy. In...

'There's great power in talking, but there's greater power in laughing. Even the best doctor in the world would be hard pushed to find a treatment with better medicinal properties...

The harrowing true story of one boy's experiences in a brutal 'approved' school for young offenders in '50s London, run by Catholic monks where violence and abuse were rife. Beaten...

'A wonderful book'David Park, Irish TimesIn 1949, when Marianne Elliott was just a baby, her parents moved into the White City, one of the first mixed-religion estates to be built...

In the 1970s Alice Leahy left nursing to work and live in a Dublin homeless shelter. This is the story of her life and life choices, from an empowering childhood,...

A poignant and introspective memoir from Irish journalist and broadcaster Charlie Bird. In 2021, Charlie Bird was diagnosed with motor neurone disease - a man whose voice was so synonymous...

In over forty years in medicine - seven of these as Master of the National Maternity Hospital - obstetrician Peter Boylan was at the births of more than 6,000 babies....

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...

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 -...

Well-known DJ Nikki Hayes has lived most of her life with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), a serious mental disorder marked by a pattern of ongoing instability in mood, behaviour, self-image...

Nora Ephron meets Bram Stoker in Sophie White's vivid and ambitious literary non-fiction collection. White asks uncomfortable questions about the lived reality of womanhood in the 21st century, and the...

Dr Tony Holohan served as Chief Medical Officer in Ireland for 14 years, but only really became known to the public during the Covid 19 pandemic. During this time his...

Stories to inspire.Stories to connect.Extraordinary moments in which women's lives changed forever.Exhilarating, heartbreaking and ultimately inspiring, The Day That Changed My Life is a remarkable collection of stories of Ireland's...

Ulick O'Connor takes us into the heart of Irish life in the 70s and 80s, evoking the streets and bars of Dublin with their now legendary characters: the world of...