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Dreamtime is a visionary work of myth, memory, and spiritual excavation by one of Ireland’s most original thinkers. In this profound journey of the soul, John Moriarty draws from global mythologies, literature, and personal experience to uncover the shared stories that shape human consciousness and the natural world. Woven through with richly poetic language and startling philosophical insight, Moriarty reconnects Western culture with the sacred imagination it has long forsaken. From Aboriginal Dreamtime to Homer, from Celtic folklore to Christian mysticism, Moriarty travels widely and fearlessly through the symbolic landscapes that have animated human life for millennia. The task of the poet-philosopher, Moriarty suggests, is to enlarge our capacity for symbolic understanding, while keeping the path to Connla’s Well open and inviting us to inhabit a shared Dreamtime Dreamtime is not just a book—it is a re-enchantment, a call to awaken the mythic soul and to live in harmony with the Earth and its ancient wisdoms. A Book of Revelations grounded in sense as in spirit, Dreamtime refuses known categories, invites fresh modes of understanding and contains multitudes, introducing the reader to ‘the splendour and terror and danger and wonder of a world everywhere and in everything eruptively Divine’. This is a powerful work of literature by a masterspirit of modern times.

The new collection from John Moriarty, edited by Martin Shaw.There is a radical agency in John Moriarty’s work not always acknowledged. As our heads spin with mythological cross-referencing, poetical leaps and the philosophical bent, it is clear that there is nothing domestic, nothing tame, about John Moriarty. The power of Moriarty is that he has found a thousand beautiful ways to say something very disturbing: we have to change our lives.In this small book of big thoughts, award-winning author, mythologist and storyteller Martin Shaw situates Moriarty’s work with respect to our eco-conscious era and a readership seeking spiritual and philosophical guidance. Moriarty asks of us only one thing – that we move our gaze from seeing to beholding. And there the trouble begins, when we realize there is a world beyond us far bigger than our temporary ambitions.A Hut at the Edge of the Village presents a collection of Moriarty’s writings ordered thematically, with sections ranging from place, love and wildness through to voyaging, ceremony and the legitimacy of sorrow. These carefully chosen extracts are supported by an introduction by Martin Shaw and foreword by Tommy Tiernan, a long-time admirer of Moriarty’s work.According to Shaw, ‘These are not pastoral times we are living in, but prophetic. We are at a moment when the world as we understand it has been turned upside down. The challenge is that there are fewer and fewer people who can interpret such happenings in a deep, soulful way. Moriarty can do that. When culture is in woeful crisis, the insights never come from parliament, senate, or committee; they come from the hut at the edge of the village. Let’s go there. There is tremendous, unexpected hope waiting.’

Dead as Doornails, first published in 1976, brings back into print a true classic of Irish memoir. Anthony Cronin’s account of life in post-war literary Dublin is as funny and colourful as one would expect from an intimate of Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh and Myles na Gopaleen; but it is also a clear-eyed and bracing antidote to the kitsch that passes for literary history and memory in the Dublin of today. Cronin writes with remarkable subtlety of the frustrations and pathologies of this generation: the excess of drink, the shortage of sex, the insecurity and begrudgery, the painful limitations of cultural life, and the bittersweet pull of exile. We read of a comical sojourn in France with Behan, and of Cronin’s years in London as a literary editor and a friend of the writer Julian Maclaren-Ross and the painters Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun. The generation chronicled by Cronin was one of wasted promise. That waste is redressed through the shimmering prose of Dead as Doornails, earning its place in Irish literary history alongside the best works of Behan, Kavanagh and Myles.

This anthology of personal essays explore how video games have shaped our lives, our cultural imagination and contemporary storytelling. From novelists and critics to game designers themselves, the writers in this collection ask the question, ‘Can video games truly be art?’ From triple-A, big budget blockbusters like Grand Theft Auto or Assassin’s Creed, to quiet, meditative Indie games like Journey or Stardew Valley, video games, like all artforms, offer us insight into ourselves and the world around us. They help shape our identities, introduce us to other ways of thinking, new languages, alternate worlds. They can offer us escape. They can also offer us control. We reach back into the past to try and recapture the feeling of that first playthrough, the feeling of expanse, the feeling of control. Addiction is also touched on in these essays. Video games can become a replacement for a much more dangerous addiction, and the writers tell us candidly how video games helped; wasted hours in virtual worlds, completing tasks that had no bearing on a real world they couldn’t quite deal with. These collected essays explore the good and the bad sides of gaming; how video games are used as a cypher, as a new way of looking at the world, and indeed the impact they have had on the lives of the writers themselves. Featuring contributions from acclaimed and emerging writers, both Irish and international - including Rob Doyle, John Patrick McHugh, Una-Minh Kavanagh, Brenda Romero, Sheila Armstrong, Roisin Kiberd, and more - this anthology is an exploration of one of the most influential cultural forms of our time.

From award-winning author Adrian Duncan comes his first collection of astonishing short stories. These modern stories have been written over the past decade, half having been previously published in The Moth, The Stinging Fly, Dublin Review and elsewhere, half completely new. Patterning and happenstance make up the rich quotidian lives of the characters portrayed in these strange, energetic tales. The loose figures of young artists, footballers and artisan engineers act out against diverse backgrounds from Dublin’s northside to Hamburg, Abu Dhabi and Accra, lives tethered yet adrift in a random universe of hard scrabble and occasional illumination. The prose is spare, precise and imagistic, the humour dark and absurdist, shot through with an underlying humanity that has become the trademark of this remarkable writer. Taking inspiration from his childhood fascination with football team formations, Duncan arranges this collection with an eye to how each piece interacts with the others: ‘While looking at a starting eleven and imagining the team’s possible patterns of movement on the field of play, one question always prevails: What is behind all of this?’ With two novels and one short story collection published in the same number of years, the Lilliput Press is proud to present this new collection as Adrian Duncan quickly gains international attention. Recently winning the inaugural John McGahern Annual Book Prize and being shortlisted for the inaugural Dalkey Literary Award for Emerging Writer, Duncan’s prowess grows with each work. Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2021 Longlist.

While Patrick Kavanagh (1904-67) was above all a poet, for most of his writing life he was a prolific producer of critical and autobiographical prose. Work for newspapers and magazines was often his main source of income, and provided him with a necessary outlet for his views on the writers of his time, and past times; on the spiritual function of poetry, and on his own background and experiences as an isolated genius, impoverished, sometimes ostracized, and surrounded, as he saw it, by mediocrity. The prose complements the poetry telling us things about Kavanagh that the poems do not tell. This is the first authoritative gathering of the shorter prose writings. Edited and introduced by Antoinette Quinn, Kavanagh’s leading interpreter and biographer, ‘A Poet’s Country: Selected Prose’ supplants the earlier, inadequate 1967, ‘Collected Prose,’ which contained material already available elsewhere and focused on later writings at the expense of work from the vital decades of the thirties and forties. ‘A Poet’s Country‘ is both a reliable scholarly edition and an immensely readable, entertaining collection. It contains the essential shorter prose works from throughout Kavanagh’s career: the legendary autobiographical pieces and rural reminiscences and a thorough selection of Kavanagh’s penetrating, sometimes scabrous, literary and cultural criticism. Its verve and musicality, poignancy and pitch, rage and glory, expresses as no other the voice of rural Ireland.

In Middle Quarter, architect John Tuomey continues the story of his life in architecture. The narrative moves from intimate laments on the loss of aging parents and artist friends to reflections on the poetical and practical aspects of an architect’s role in contemporary society.The focus shifts back and forth between personal episodes and recollected events, from the struggles of starting out in partnership with Sheila O’Donnell to their successes and failures in the international arena of architectural design.Written in clear and compact prose, including conceptual sketches and selected photographs, the book discloses sources of inspiration and ideas behind O’Donnell + Tuomey’s distinctive and dramatic designs, including the Glucksman Gallery Cork, the Lyric Theatre Belfast and public buildings in London and Budapest.Middle Quarter, a mid-career memoir, is a companion volume to First Quarter, the place-based trajectory of Tuomey’s first twenty-five years, published by Lilliput Press in 2023.

What is the sound of a voice that is alienated from itself? How can one truthfully represent the creative process of an artist? Oona, an artist-in-the-making, lives in an affluent suburban culture of first-generation immigrants in New Jersey where conspicuous consumption and white privilege prevail, and the denial of death is ubiquitous. The silence surrounding death extends to the family home where Oona is not told while her mother lies dying of cancer upstairs. Afterwards, a silence takes hold inside her: her inner life goes into a deep freeze. Emotionally hobbled, she has her first encounters with sex, drugs and other trials of adolescence.Lyons’ first novel gives voice to a female character on her fraught journey into adulthood and charts her evolution as an artist, as her adolescent dissociation is thawed through contact with the physical world, the materials of painting and her engagement with Irish community, culture and landscape.Set during the era of the Celtic Tiger and its aftermath, this is a resonant story conveyed in an innovative form. Written entirely without the letter ‘o’, the tone of the book reflects Oona’s inner damage and the destruction caused by hiding, omitting and obliterating parts of ourselves.

My Traitor tells the story of Antoine, an idealistic young French violin-maker, who takes a train from Dublin to Belfast in 1977 and is propelled into the heart of the Falls Road and the Republican movement, and Ireland’s music, suffering and beauty. He meets Tyrone Meehan, a charismatic. high-ranking member of the IRA, who becomes his friend and mentor, and a symbol of the Irish struggle. As he increasingly identifies with his newfound home, Antoine leaves behind his life in Paris. Over the next three decades, from the streets of Belfast to the fields of Donegal, he witnesses the marches, the hunger strikes, the peace process, learning about bombs, prison, poverty and pride. In 2005 his world implodes when the IRA finally lay down their arms and Tyrone is revealed as an informer. An intense depiction of the nature of friendship and loyalty, and the emptiness occasioned by betrayal, My Traitor is a powerful lyric novel – an ode to Northern Ireland – paying an outsider’s tribute to a wounded and extraordinary country. Acclaimed in France, My Traitor won several award on publication in 2007. One reviewer wrote: ‘Why did Chalandon choose to write a novel rather than a documentary? Because fiction enabled him to go where he couldn’t: to meet “his traitor” face to face, to look him in the eye and ask: “what about our friendship? Was that a lie as well?” We understand Antoine. We understand Chalandon. He doesn’t falter. His book is a rugged account of a terrible beauty.’

Now available for the first time in Ireland and the UK – more than half a century after it was written – is the memoir of Michael Dillon/Lobzang Jivaka (1915–62), the Anglo-Irish doctor and Buddhist monastic novice chiefly known to scholars of sex, gender, and sexuality for his pioneering transition from female to male between 1939 and 1949, and for his groundbreaking 1946 book Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology. Here at last is Dillon/Jivaka’s extraordinary life story told in his own words.Out of the Ordinary captures Dillon/Jivaka’s various journeys – to Oxford, into medicine, across the world by ship – within the major narratives of his gender and religious journeys. Moving chronologically, Dillon/Jivaka was from Lismullin House, County Meath, but spent his childhood in Folkestone, England, where he was raised by spinster aunts, telling of his days at Oxford immersed in theology, classics, and rowing. He recounts his hormonal transition while working as an auto mechanic and fire watcher in Bristol during World War II and describes his surgical transition under Sir Harold Gillies while Dillon himself attended medical school at Trinity College, Dublin (1945-51). He details his travels as a ship’s surgeon in the British Merchant Navy with extensive commentary on his engagement with colonial and postcolonial subjects in Asia, followed by his ‘outing’ by the British press while he served aboard The City of Bath.Out of the Ordinary is not only a unique record of early gender affirmation but also a compelling account of religious conversion in the mid-twentieth century. Dillon/Jivaka chronicles his gradual shift from Anglican Christianity to the esoteric spiritual systems of George Gurdjieff and Peter Ouspensky, to Theravada and finally Mahayana Buddhism. He concludes his memoir with the contested circumstances of his Buddhist monastic ordination in India and Tibet. Ultimately, while Dillon/Jivaka died before becoming a monk, his novice ordination was significant: it made him the first white European man to be ordained in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.This first-person narrative, written in the early 1960s and first published more than a generation later in the US by Fordham University Press, is both ahead of its time and distinctly of its time and class, with Dillon’s views being sometimes enlightened, sometimes colonial. A Foreword by Susan Stryker from the Fordham University Press edition describes Dillon as ‘a seeker after truth, who traveled wherever his queries led him’. An Afterword, ‘A Mapless Journey’, by London-based literary agent Andrew Hewson – unique to the Lilliput Press edition – traces the typescript memoir’s provenance and preservation prior to its eventual publication. An introductory biographical essay by consultant psychologist Aidan Collins gives an overview of the timeline of this remarkable individual’s history. Out of the Ordinary is a landmark publication that sets free a singular voice from within the history of the transgender movement.

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 about his time at Roundstone and environs, restoring gardens at Leitirdyfe House and Lisnabrucka, and building his own house at Toombeola. He reflects on his Kerry childhood and the death of his father; he describes his adopted family, a sortie to Dublin for Christmas, the writer Tim Robinson, and his neighbourhood and community; he celebrates the returned pine martens and the fauna and flora of a historic landscape; he undertakes a lecture tour in Canada organized by his former students; and throughout he engages with the immensities of the natural and spiritual worlds that form his habitat. In this posthumously published work, completed just weeks before his death, John Moriarty calls to account the literatures and legacies of European thought made manifest in the western extremities of Ireland. They bore witness to his own inner and outer journey, now documented in this compelling, writerly masterwork.

In this astonishing volume of autobiography, John Moriarty s earlier works of mystical philosophy, Dreamtime and Turtle Was Gone a Long Time, are given a biographical grounding. Inhabited by all that he reads and perceives, Moriarty recovers lost forms of sensibility and categories of understanding, reconciling them gloriously within the arc of his life. Nostos is a Greek word meaning homecoming . In its plural form, nostoi, it was the name of an extensive body of literature in ancient Greece about the Greek heroes who returned from the Trojan Wars. Most of this literature has perished, but we do have the Odyssey, describing the long homecoming of Odysseus to Ithaca. Moriarty's book assumes that for various reasons humanity is now exiled from the earth, but by reimagining it and ourselves as involved in a common destiny, it enacts a homecoming, a nostos to it. In pursuit of this enterprise the book unwinds an Ariadne's skein of sponsoring and enabling myths, not all of them indigenous, some f them inaugurating an alternative to our Western way.

Beirut, 1982, at the outbreak of the second Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and the young French activist George has been tasked by his old friend Samuel – a Greek Jewish resistance fighter and theatre director – with staging a performance of Jean Anouilh’s Antigone in the Lebanese city.With a cast composed of those on all sides – Palestinian, Christian, Druze, Jewish, Shiite, Sunni, Chaldean and Armenian – and a stage caught amid the chaos and destruction of the approaching war, George and Sam hope that this radical act of art may spark the beginnings of peace and reconciliation. Their aspirations, however, are soon confronted by the brutal realities of the conflict and the true price of violence. Profound, harrowing and as urgently relevant as ever, The Fourth Wall is a stunning literary novel, informed by the author’s own experiences as a journalist in the Middle East.Winner of the Prix Goncourt des lycéens and le Choix de l'Orient.

‘Back in the flat, Sylvia is no use. She doesn’t have any ideas, all she suggests is get a job, take your time, get some money together, then go somewhere. But Clodagh needs to go now, needs to go today if possible. Even Seamus has gone. But where, and with what?’Clodagh finds herself adrift after leaving her partner Seamus. Navigating addiction, the harsh realities of a housing crisis, and relationships pushed to the brink, this is a story of her attempts to reconnect with herself, and those closest to her, in a gritty, vividly rendered contemporary Dublin.Weaving from place to place and person to person – past friends, fellow users and her worried mother Sylvia – Clodagh struggles to fully understand herself, or the city she calls home. Urban isolation, the trials of modern life and the fleeting beauty found in Dublin marble every scene of this novel. Somewhere is a raw and intimate portrait of a woman balancing on the edge of survival, seeking meaning and love amid isolation and addiction.

In south Kilkenny, where Duiske stream joins the river Barrow at Graiguenamanagh, lies one of Ireland’s many Norman-Cistercian abbeys. Song of Duiske is a novella set amongst this monastic community in the year 1304, a century after the abbey’s foundation. It evokes the textures and rhythms of a medieval religious settlement, its peaceful routines as well as occasional trials, and celebrates with quiet lyricism the seasons and their solaces, ‘the open sky, the fields and the woods’.

Ireland’s history has long been illuminated, and enlivened, by bizarre, colourful, extravagant, unfettered individuals: ripe country-house eccentrics, saints, scholars, bucks and hell-rakes, duellists, abductors, rhymers and miracle-makers. These factual and fascinating biographical sketches make for ‘delightful reading’ (Frank Muir).

Irish genealogy now attracts unprecedented interest both at home and abroad. Many who try to trace their roots, however, are disappointed. This practical, fact-filled book can turn failure into success. The Irish Roots Guide – offers clear, step-by-step instructions – provides an introduction to each of the important documentary collections – equips you to do your own research in the Irish archives, showing how to avoid pitfalls – adopts a fresh approach to family history, debunks myths, and never forgets that half of our ancestors were women. Whether your research is to be a lifelong hobby or a once-off quest, this book will prove indispensable.

This classic study of Irish culture, extensively illustrated with photographs, maps and drawings, and reissued with a new foreword and an updated bibliography, gives a detailed yet panoramic view of Ireland. It follows in the great tradition of French historiography, adding the testament of landscape, antiquities and folk custom to that of document-based history as a primary source of knowledge of our past. It is a justly acclaimed, stimulating work of instruction, entertainment and enlightenment.

X + Y = K is the final, astonishing work by the late Ciaran Carson – an electrifying fusion of memoir, ghost story, and speculative fiction that pushes his lifelong preoccupations with memory, time, and perception into audacious new territory. Moving between Belfast and London, the novel traces the fractured consciousness of Kilpatrick, a man haunted by migraine visions, childhood trauma, and the spectral machinery of history. As séances, scientific experiments, and art-historical meditations bleed into one another, the boundaries between worlds grow porous: tables levitate, cities shimmer like palimpsests, and the dead return in flickers of light. Carson’s trademark blend of forensic detail and lyrical expansiveness animates a narrative where parallel realities overlap, where surveillance and spiritualism mirror each other, and where every object – painting, watch, typewriter – carries its hidden aura. A profound meditation on vulnerability, doubleness, and the stories we invent to survive, X + Y = K is Carson’s final, radiant act of imagination.

Architecture, like print, is ubiquitous, a part of thefabric of culture which touches every aspect of our lives while reflecting, and articulating, socio-economic change. As the twentieth century draws to a close, the architecture inscribed in its early decades attracts ever-closer scrutiny. The design movements in fin-de-siècle Europe saw manifestations of modernism combine with unprecedented advances in technology and American machine culture, emerging in a ‘new architecture’: Viennese Rationalism supplanted free-form Art Nouveau; Beaux Arts gave way to Le Corbusier; bizarre brick Expressionism of the Amsterdam School coexisted with De Stijl’s bare abstractions. Modern architecture in the form of the International Style of Gropius and the Bauhaus reached its apogee in the early 1930s, but styles scorned by this orthodoxy – Art Deco and stripped Classicism – flourished alongside it and are now being reappraised. Ireland and the New Architecture 1900-1940 is the first comprehensive study of its subject. It describes the pioneering buildings of the period and examines their intellectual scaffolding and the influence of international design movements, demonstrating that Ireland was no architectural backwater, as is often assumed. It looks in detail at the writings and examples of early modernism and the way in which architects of a fledgling Free State went beyond Britain to France, Holland, Scandinavia, Austria, Germany and America for models of new structures in both private and public spheres of building. A generous selection of over two hundred drawings and photographs, along with extended interview material with survivors from the time, give this book unique value. It is both a stimulating work of reference and a survey-guide to Ireland’s position in, and contribution to, the mainstream of modern architecture.

EIGHTY YEARS AFTER HIS DEATH, the legend of Ernest Shackleton and the extraordinary story of the Endurance South Pole expedition still hold a compelling grip on the public imagination. Trapped in drifting polar pack ice, Ernest Shackleton and his crew fought for survival against all the odds. When the Endurance was finally crushed, they were stranded on ice-floes for more than a year before reaching Elephant Island in April 1916. From there Shackleton and his five men embarked on the most remarkable rescue mission in maritime history, sailing to South Georgia across eight hundred miles of the world's roughest seas in a small open boat. Despite failing to realize his dream of reaching the South Pole, Shackleton's story lives on because of his unique qualities of leadership and the fact that all his men survived. This compelling narrative reveals the profound influence of Shackleton's Irish and Quaker roots, offering a vivid portrait of a man whose ambition was tempered by his flawed humanity and egalitarianism. Here too are the untold stories of Shackleton's upbringing in Kildare; his time in the Merchant Navy; his 1901 voyage on the Discovery with Scott; his 1907 Nimrod expedition; his marriage and love affairs; his life as public figure and politician; and the haunting story of his final, fatal expedition on the Quest. Drawing on family records, diaries and letters – and hitherto unpublished photographs and archive material – this mesmerizing biography takes us beyond the myth to Shackleton the man, for whom 'Optimism is true moral courage,' and whose greatest triumph was that of life over death. Shackleton: An Irishman in Antarctica, is lavishly illustrated with over a hundred photographs, maps and engravings, some of them appearing in print for the first time.

From Out My Heart is a darkly sensuous novel about two women whose bodies become the threshold through which the living and the dead insist on speaking, from the award-winning author of Follow Me to Ground and Redder Days. When Phyllipa, a scholar chasing the lingering pulse of Edgar Allan Poe, travels to a remote, river‑ruled community, she finds herself drawn into the orbit of Lana: a woman whose faith, exhaustion, and old wounds make her strangely open to visitation. Their encounters unfold in a landscape of heatstorms, thickets, and swollen riverlight, where possession is not a metaphor but a physical event: a tremor in the voice, a shift in the hips, a borrowed breath. As Phyllipa records Lana’s transformations, she feels her own interior loosening – the boundaries between scholarship and desire, between inquiry and complicity, dissolving into the wet dark of the woods. Rainsford crafts a gothic of flesh and inheritance, where motherhood, harm, and spectral longing press against the skin. A novel of haunting in its truest sense: the way another life can move through a woman’s body, and the way a woman can become the echo chamber for what history refuses to release.

‘There’s more than one kind of beauty, just as there’s more than one kind of love.’ He pauses. ‘And in this community we’re building, we know that love divided is not love lessened.’Rome, 1819. Into the sun-drenched streets of the Eternal City arrive the Shelleys: dazzling, volatile and dangerously entangled. Irish artist Amelia Curran encounters Mary Shelley, her mercurial husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont – and is drawn into a world shimmering with genius. But shadows lie behind the glamour. And Amelia becomes reluctant witness to the trio’s rivalries, griefs and secrets, which sharpen in the heat of an Italian summer.Haunted by the portrait of executed noblewoman Beatrice Cenci, Amelia confronts the limits of art, loyalty and female agency. Meanwhile, the Shelleys’ lives unravel as illicit desires flare, past tragedies resurface and a child’s life hangs in the balance. Layered, intimate and steeped in historical context, Glorious Monsters is a spellbinding reimagining of the Romantic circle – where brilliance and ruin are inextricably linked.

In this wonderous new work of nature writing, naturalist Declan Murphy undertakes an unforgettable journey across Ireland in search of its rarest and most beguiling orchids – accompanied always by his steadfast Dalmatian, Lucy. What begins with the discovery of a single withered stem in the winter‑bleak Burren becomes a summer‑long odyssey through limestone pavements, mountain bogs, ancient eskers and hidden woodlands. Murphy’s luminous, deeply attentive prose reveals a hidden Ireland where Arctic and Mediterranean species meet, where orchids flower briefly and mysteriously, and where nature’s beauty is inseparable from its fragility. Along the way, he encounters rare plants, devoted botanists, moments of quiet revelation, and landscapes that feel both timeless and under threat. Both a memoir of wonder and a celebration of Ireland’s wild places, this is a moving, richly observed tribute to curiosity, resilience, and the quiet companionship of a dog who sees it all at his side.

Eoin’s O’Brien’s latest work of literary memoir and vivid recollection continues his work of recapuring and reframing memories of times gone. In this beautfully-written work, he offers illuminating glimpses of a bygone Dublin, and memories of literary character therein, especially his close relationship with Samuel Beckett. Beautifully illustrated and filled with first-hand communications with writers including Beckett, this is a must-read for literary and historical enthusiasts of Dublin’s golden literary era.

Adrian Frazier’s story about his friend John Behan is an informed, compelling personal account of this remarkable man. It gives focus and depth to the life of one of Ireland’s leading visual artists. The narrative follows Behan’s childhood in east Dublin to his role as a pivotal member of the creative fusion that was 1960s Dublin ‘Baggotonia’ (including Patrick Kavanagh, John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Patrick Pye, Camille Souter and Thomas Kinsella) and of the Independent Artists’ group. John Behan has lived in Galway for many years, helping to establish the region and the city as a creative haven for its many artists and galleries: it is here that author and sculptor became friends. Beautifully designed and with over thirty full-colour photographs and illustrations, John Behan: The Bull of Sheriff Street is a fitting tribute and celebration of Ireland’s most famous living sculptor. The work includes a listing of one hundred of the artist’s principal works.

The Sway of Winter tells the story of Birgit, a young Scandinavian woman who has moved to the island of Inis Breac to paint, and to recover from a suffocating relationship. Geoff, an English widower, shattered by years of hard drinking after his wife’s drowning, runs the local bookshop. Birgit visits Africa in a quest to decide her future in working among the deprived, but finds there only a mirror of an inner poverty. This finely wrought debut novel is a potent revelation of how lives converge in the passage between trauma and resolution, leading to emotional renewal. With a fresh and unusual voice new to Irish fiction, Orla Murphy captivates the reader with her passionate and nuanced narrative.

When the first edition of this book appeared in 1972 it was acclaimed as a revolutionary breakthrough in the study of late medieval Ireland and of the autonomous lordships into which it was divided. Since then it has repeatedly and extensively cited as an authority, but has long been out of print. This edition of a pioneering and brilliant survey work is comprehensively revised and enlarged in the light of additional research by the author, and other scholars, carried out in the intervening period. New information on late Irish law and the lordships has been added, and the glossary and bibliography extended. Gaelic and Gaelicized Ireland is an indispensable adjunct to all students and readers in medieval Irish and European history.

The girl of this story is a clairvoyant. To the other children in the local National School, she is an ‘imbissil’, a creature of the margins. But she is a lightning-conductor for all that happens in one small Irish country town and through her are channeled all the dreams and desires of its exuberant inhabitants. The girl’s grandmother, lives in a beech tree, ‘screeching, singing … fragments constantly spilling out of her memory-box’; Vera McGettrick’s fiance blows his head off a week before their wedding; Liz Duffy, the ‘apostate’ who marries a protestant (‘the other crowd’), is denounced as a ‘slut, whore and rip’; and the lovelorn ghost of Dockery the draper, is ‘still to be seen fishing on winter evenings’. Potently charged with historical echoes, eroticism, literary allusion and wild humour, Story of a Girl takes the reader on a rollercoaster voyage into a kaleidoscopic world of pure, unfettered language. Here, lyrical English, visions, snatches of song and bursts of Irish combine to harness the very pulse of life, engaging the reader’s attention on every shimmering page.