Secondhand Irish Biography Books

'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...

Sunday Times Memoir of the Year 2019RTE Radio 1 Listeners' Choice Award Winner 2019 - An Post Irish Book AwardsWhen Vicky Phelan delivered an emotionally charged statement from the steps...

'I have come to think of all the metal in my body as artificial stars, glistening beneath the skin, a constellation of old and new metal. A map, a tracing...

'A book which will very soon be acknowledged as a classic of Irish sportswriting' Ciaran MurphyWhat is it like to be female in a male-dominated sporting world? If you play...

Marie Fleming became a household name in Ireland with her trail-blazing campaign for the right to die with dignity, when she took a landmark case against the Irish State to...

Brighid 'Biddy' McLaughlin, the acclaimed Irish journalist and storyteller, has endured unthinkable tragedy-the murder of her beloved sister Siobhan and the devastating drowning of her husband. Yet, in the face...

Orla Tinsley is well known as a campaigner for the rights of people with Cystic Fibrosis in Ireland. In her memoir, she takes us on a journey into the inner...

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...

In this compelling memoir, first published in 1957 and now appearing in this updated paperback edition, prima ballerina Ninette de Valois writes about her extraordinary career: the vivid memories of...

John Carthy was an average guy, a hard-working young man devoted to his mother and sister, who also happened to suffer from depression - in common with one in four...

As heard on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour'Ireland and its people know that Fiona Doyle is a trailblazer' Sunday Independent'A wrenching read ... Doyle resists giving her story a Hollywood...

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...

'Honest, vulnerable and empowering' Angela Scanlon'Poignant, profound, and moving, I have no doubt that this beautifully written book will comfort anyone who is in the process of falling apart' Louise...

Christy Mangan knows how hard it is to solve a murder.In his forty-year career, Mangan participated in or led over 100 murder investigations. And he set up the Garda cold...

`There followed a blue flash accompanied by a ver y bright magnesium-type flare ... Then came a frighteningly loud but rather flat explosion, which was followed by a blast of...

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...

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...

'Destined to be a classic' Sunday Independent'Gabriel Byrne tells his story brilliantly' - Edna O'Brien'Dazzles with unflinching honesty' Washington Post'An absolutely marvellous book' - Colm ToibinBorn to working-class parents and...

This is the autobiography of actor, storyteller and seanchai, Eamon Kelly. It takes its title from the fact that the young Kelly was apprenticed to his father, a wheelwright and...

Originally published in 1992, this childhood memoir, revised and augmented, now has the status of a modern Irish classic. On his first trip abroad, Adrian Kenny observes that the signs...

In September 2013, on the Late Late Showin front of an audience of more than half a million, Majella O'Donnell had her hair shaved off and raised a phenomenal 600,000...

THE NO.1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLERFrom the crowded working-class streets of 1960s Dublin, comes the powerful and inspiring true story of three young sisters who - after years of abuse and trauma...