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The Green Road by Anne Enright |
The children of Rosaleen Madigan leave the west of Ireland for lives they never could have imagined in Dublin, New York and various third-world towns. In her early old age their difficult, wonderful mother announces that she's decided to sell the house and divide the proceeds. Her adult children come back for one last Christmas, with the feeling that their childhoods are being erased, their personal history bought and sold. |
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Don’t Touch my Hair by Emma Dabiri |
Available in e-book and e-audiobook
Over a series of wry, informed chapters, Emma Dabiri takes us from pre-colonial Africa, through the Harlem Renaissance, Black Power and on to today's Natural Hair Movement, the Cultural Appropriation Wars and beyond. We look at everything from hair capitalists like Madam C.J. Walker in the early 1900s to the rise of Shea Moisture today, from women's solidarity and friendship to 'black people time', forgotten African scholars and the dubious provenance of Kim Kardashian's braids. 'Don't Touch My Hair' proves that far from being only hair, black hairstyling culture can be understood as an allegory for black oppression and, ultimately, liberation.
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Rory and Ita by Roddy Doyle |
Available in e-book
Through their eyes we see the intensely Catholic society of their youth being transformed into the vibrant, modern Ireland of today. Both are marvellous talkers, so combined with Roddy
Doyle's legendary skill in illuminating ordinary experience, Rory & Ita makes for a book of tremendous warmth and humanity.
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The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue |
Available in e-book
In an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease, nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city centre, where expectant mothers who have come down with an unfamiliar flu are quarantined together. Into Julia's regimented world step two outsiders: Doctor Kathleen Lynn, on the run from the police, and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney. In the darkness and intensity of this tiny ward, over three days, these women change each other's lives in unexpected ways. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic, but they also shepherd new life into a fearful world.
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Dracula by Bram Stoker |
Available in e-audiobook
Jonathan Harker is travelling to Castle Dracula to see the Transylvanian noble, Count Dracula. He is begged by locals not to go but business must be done and so Jonathan makes his way to the Castle. His nightmares soon begin and his beloved wife Meena and other lost souls fall under the Count's horrifying spell.
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Normal People by Sally Rooney |
Available in e-book
Connell and Marianne grow up in the same small town in rural Ireland. The similarities end there; they are from very different worlds. When they both earn places at Trinity College in
Dublin, a connection that has grown between them lasts long into the following years. This is an exquisite love story about how a person can change another person's life - a simple yet
profound realisation that unfolds beautifully over the course of the novel. It tells us how difficult it is to talk about how we feel and it tells us - blazingly - about cycles of domination,
legitimacy and privilege.
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Brooklyn by Colm Toibin |
In a small town in the south-east of Ireland in the 1950s, Eilis Lacey is among many of her generation who cannot find work at home. So when she is offered a job in America, she leaves her family to start a new life in Brooklyn. |
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Postscript by Cecelia Ahern |
Available in e-book
It's been seven years since Holly Kennedy's husband died - six since she read his final letter, urging Holly to find the courage to forge a new life. She's proud of all the ways in which she has grown and evolved. But when a group inspired by Gerry's letters, calling themselves the PS, I Love You Club, approaches Holly asking for help, she finds herself drawn back into a world that she worked so hard to leave behind. Reluctantly, Holly beings a relationship with the club, even as their friendship threatens to destroy the peace she believes she has achieved. As each of these people calls upon Holly to help them leave something meaningful behind for their loved ones, Holly will embark on a remarkable journey - one that will challenge her to ask whether embracing the future means betraying the past, and what it means to love someone forever.
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A Week in Winter by Maeve Binchy |
Available in e-audiobook
At Stone House, Henry and Nicola are burdened with a terrible secret. Winnie finds herself on the holiday from hell. Then there's John, who arrived on impulse after he missed a flight at
Shannon; eccentric Freda, who claims to be a psychic - and the silent, watchful Nell, who seems so ready to disapprove. But looks can be deceptive!
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The Wych Elm by Tana French |
Available in e-book
One night changes everything for Toby. He's always led a charmed life - until a brutal attack leaves him damaged and traumatised, unsure even of the person he used to be. He seeks
refuge at his family's ancestral home, the Ivy House, filled with memories of wild-strawberry summers and teenage parties with his cousins. But not long after Toby's arrival, a discovery is
made: a skull, tucked neatly inside the old wych elm in the garden. As detectives begin to close in, Toby is forced to examine everything he thought he knew about his family, his past, and
himself. A spellbinding book from a novelist who takes crime writing and turns it inside out, 'The Wych Elm' asks what we become, and what we're capable of, if we no longer know who
we are.
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The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne |
Cyril Avery is not a real Avery - or at least that's what his adoptive parents tell him. And he never will be. But if he isn't a real Avery, then who is he? Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl
cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple via the intervention of a hunchbacked Redemptorist nun, Cyril is adrift in the world, anchored
only tenuously by his heartfelt friendship with the infinitely more glamorous and dangerous Julian Woodbead. At the mercy of fortune and coincidence, he will spend a lifetime coming to
know himself and where he came from - and over his three score years and ten, will struggle to discover an identity, a home, a country and much more.
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Our Little Cruelties by Liz Nugent |
Available in e-book
Three brothers are at the funeral. One lies in the coffin. Will, Brian and Luke grow up competing for their mother's unequal love. As men, the competition continues - for status, money, fame, women. They each betray each other, over and over, until one of them is dead. But which brother killed him?
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