Like journalists, photographers are chroniclers of our time, cataloguing events with images and words, capturing moments that would otherwise be lost in time. We’ve all seen this sort of book before, representing the brand of Irish shamrock and
Irish directors such as Jim Sheridan and Neil Jordan are feted and celebrated world-wide. But Brian Desmond Hurst, Ireland’s most prolific film director, has been all but forgotten. A flamboyant bon viveur and
Between 1845 and 1850, more than a million Irish people starved to death. Another half-million were evicted from their homes during the potato blight, and a further million-and-a-half emigrated to America, Britain and Australia. The Naming of Eliza
‘Fire smoulders, it burns, it rages, it purges and purifies; it engenders great passion and it destroys. You were named for fire, Ellen Rua.’ Widowed during the Great Irish Famine, Ellen ‘Rua’ O’Malley escapes to Boston
The Electric Michelangelo is Sarah Hall’s second novel and was a Booker short-listed novel in 2004. Her first, Haweswater, won the 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book, the Betty Trask Award and the Lakeland Book Prize for Arts
Jack Reacher is an ex-military cop who, ever since leaving the army, has drifted from one place to the next with no fixed abode, no main purpose and no destination. He is a dyed in the wool American hero, battle-hardened, footloose, sexy and compassionate, and the last
In Eating with the Angels, Sarah-Kate Lynch has put reviewers in a bit of a pickle. The story, which starts off with New York Times restaurant reviewer Connie Farrell en route to Venice for her second honeymoon – but without her husband, takes
Elena leads a pretty normal life. She’s a solicitor, she has an accountant boyfriend and she shares a flat with her two best friends. In fact the only unusual thing in her life is probably her name (her mother had a passion for Russian ice-skating). So when her
Coming back from New Zealand, I keep getting told that “staying in is the new going out” and this would seem to be borne out by the publication of both Darina Allen’s Easy Entertaining and her daughter-in-law Rachel Allen’s Favourite
Rachel Beckett has spent the last twelve years in prison convicted of her husband’s murder, which she swears she did not commit. Upon her release she discovers that after years spent in foster care, her 17-year-old daughter Amy does not want to know her
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