New Island Books

Upon its original publication in 1996, Are You Somebody? quickly became an cultural sensation in Ireland, sparking an ‘emotional episode in public life in Ireland’. O’Faolain’s striking candour and focus on the long-silenced experiences of Irish women helped the book become an international bestseller. Are You Somebody? is an extraordinary memoir that explores identity, love and the search for meaning in a changing Ireland. Nuala O’Faolain shares her life with unflinching honesty – her struggles, triumphs and the questions that shaped her journey. This is more than a memoir; it’s a conversation about what it means to live fully, to question deeply and to embrace vulnerability.

In a series of unexpected moments when past loves and choices re-surface with startling clarity, the imperfect beings who populate these stories find themselves finally grasping the impact of crucial early relationships, as joy, loss and betrayal echo across decades. A man searches for a possible secret half-sister to understand his father. A woman is haunted by a boy’s death fifty years ago. A lighthouse keeper recalls his first relationship. A public figure, slipping into dementia, relives a fateful night that haunts him. A man seeks insights into his mother’s past on a remote Portuguese island. From childhood holidays shadowed by tragedy to chance reunions that rewrite old narratives, Bolger’s complex and deeply humane characters reveal the fragile beauty of human connection.

'A heartfelt celebration of all kinds of queer love' - Alice Linehan, Gay Community News A ground-breaking Irish lesbian love story, set across the decades from the 1980s AIDS crisis to the 2015 marriage referendum. Ro McCarthy, single in her fifties and working a quiet job, is sustained by her love of books and her deep friendships. Although she still doesn’t approve of marriage – not even for the straights – she is canvassing for yes in the 2015 marriage equality referendum. But, as the ghosts of her activist past join her on the campaign trail and her eagerness to confront a familiar discrimination turns to obsession and fury, Ro must finally face the long-buried trauma and loss of her youth. Thirty years earlier, Ro is a young Cork woman living her best life in Boston, undocumented and working multiple jobs, making life-long friends, and falling in love with Jenny. Soon, however, the young gay men who have become Ro’s new family – from Ireland and elsewhere – begin to die. Shocked and grieving, she finds purpose in AIDS activism and a community that is loving and living against all odds. In the wake of this macabre heyday which Ro just about survives, her charged entanglement with Jenny will bear witness to the resistance and survival of an invisible generation of warriors. Slant is a headbutt to the heart, told from within a protective community, that will reveal and celebrate all the kinds of love needed to sustain a life.

Ireland, 1988. Storm Cordelia rages through the village of Kilcraven. Still reeling from a devastating love affair and the collapse of a promising career in the Gardaí, Emma Daly is stuck. She’s moved back in with her dad and taken a job as a librarian in Kilcraven, the small West Cork village she thought she left behind. But when Emma witnesses a murder and the local guards arrest the wrong man for the crime, she’s forced to act. To prove a man innocent, she must sift through the village’s past, her own training and her beloved collection of detective stories before either the guards or the murderer can stop her. She’s joined by a stubborn widow, an elderly hypochondriac and a charming ex-boyfriend — but quickly finds herself at the centre of a mystery that threatens to tear the whole village apart.

Mike Timms has always been a wanderer – into the bundu ('back of beyond') as a child in 1950s Kenya, around Dublin during his college years and along pilgrim paths in Wicklow and southern France as he approached the end of his working life. He has never felt lost or alone, holding a faith in moving forward, one step at a time and finding a peace – and sometimes reverence – in the quiet. So upon retirement, he embarked on his first Camino, setting out on foot just north of Carcassonne in France in the direction of Santiago de Compostela in north-west Spain. He walked as a true pilgrim, with the scallop shell hanging around his neck, his pilgrim passport in his pocket and no guarantee of a bed in the albergues along the Way. Falling in and out of step with fellow walkers, he learned to trust them and to see the unexpected – injury, fatigue, detour and the generosity of strangers – as blessings in disguise. With immediate and assured writing, Mike Timms takes us on a mindful journey as he moves through this ancient landscape, attuned to the histories, traditions and beliefs that have gone before him. To Walk the Way is his gently transporting account of taking part in them in his own unique way.

Dublin, 6 January: the Feast of the Epiphany, also known in Ireland as Women’s Christmas or Nollaig na mBan. Gretta and Gabriel Conroy attend the annual dinner party hosted by his aunts, the Morkan Sisters. As the house on Usher’s Island fills with laughter, music and dancing, the worries and secrets of the guests interweave and overlap. The festive evening culminates in a shocking confession by Gretta and a life-changing epiphany for Gabriel. The closing story of James Joyce’s Dubliners is widely considered the greatest short story ever written in the English language. His tender portrait of the Dublin of his youth has captivated readers for over a century. With a new introduction by the award-winning and bestselling Irish author Nuala O’Connor, this special edition of The Dead is a gift for the ages.

'Here is a history of publand, yes, but here is a moment in time as well.'For centuries, the public house has played an important role in the social and cultural history of Dublin. As the headquarters for a major revolution, a mecca of literary invention or a haven from work, ‘the local’ is a cornerstone of community life and a testament to human endeavour in an ever-changing city. Beginning with the taverns and ale houses of the 17th and 18th centuries, Donal Fallon brings the reader on a visual journey through world renowned public houses such as the Brazen Head, The Long Hall, Grogan’s and The Palace, and on to early houses and gay bars, spirit grocers and shebeens. As well as the establishments themselves, the ‘Plain People of Ireland’ appear in chapters about temperance, karaoke and snugs. Along the way, we meet patrons as diverse and famous around the capital as Theobald Wolfe Tone, Nell McCafferty and Con Houlihan. And visitors to Dublin are also here, as the photographer Lee Miller seeks out the city of James Joyce and Elizabeth Taylor searches in vain for the Ladies’ toilet. Drawing from rich archival collections, The Dublin Pub includes many previously unpublished photographs as well as testimonies from the past and present to bring the history of the Dublin pub to vivid life.

Shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards Biography of the YearStephen Travers has lived two lives. His first was as a young bass player, immersed in music, friendship, and the thrill of gigs on the road with The Miami Showband. But on July 31, 1975, that life shattered on the A1 road at Buskhill in County Down when a Loyalist gang ambushed the band, murdering three of his friends in an attack that would become one of the darkest moments of The Troubles. In the quiet aftermath, in a nearby field, Stephen awoke to his second life—as a survivor. This second life led him down unexpected paths: as an author, composer, producer, and international speaker on peace and reconciliation. Over decades, he worked to support other survivors, challenge suspected state collusion, and seek justice in a landmark case against the British Ministry of Defence. Yet, despite these achievements, Stephen found himself drawn back to that field, revisiting the young man he had been moments before the massacre—searching for closure, a reunion with his former self. Now, fifty years later, he has written The Bass Player, a love letter and eulogy for that first life. This book is both a deeply personal reckoning and a song for all those silenced by conflict, offering a path toward healing and, finally, peace.

Originally published in 1918 by the Talbot Press in Dublin, two years after his execution by the British Government for his involvement in the 1916 Easter Rising, Some Poems of Roger Casement has long been a collector’s item. In life and in death, Roger Casement appears to contain many contradictions: decorated British diplomat, Irish Protestant and martyred Irish nationalist. He was a humanitarian, essayist and sometime poet, a public gentleman and a private lover. Over the years, Roger Casement’s ghost has been the subject of endless controversies, co-opted into both the queer liberation movement in Ireland and the Republican movement. Predator or saviour, traitor or hero, maligned martyr or gay icon? The question depends on who you ask, and what aspects of Casement’s life they choose to hold in focus, or to dismiss as a lie. —SEÁN HEWITTIncludes a specially commissioned introduction by Seán Hewitt as well as the original 1918 introduction, written by Casement’s cousin, Gertrude Parry.

Between 1958 and 1976, the Irish American writer Mary Lavin had sixteen stories published in The New Yorker. J. D. Salinger had introduced her to the magazine and she was soon offered the magazine’s highly coveted first-reading agreement. It was a prolific time for Lavin, helped in no small part by her close working relationship with her chief editor there, Rachel MacKenzie. They wrote nearly four hundred letters to each other, the topics of which ranged from story edits to holiday plans, windfalls and legal troubles, mutual literary friends and their loveof gardening, promotions and health emergencies. Within a year of working together, they were ending their letters with ‘love’, ‘gratefully’ and ‘affectionately.’Gratefully & Affectionately: Mary Lavin & The New Yorker draws extensively from Lavin and MacKenzie’s letters as well as other material related to the revered magazine. It explores the collaborative relationship between this writer and her editor, Lavin’s own writing process, the inner workings and editing procedures of The New Yorker and the process of publishing a story from manuscript to print during its heyday. The book also reveals Lavin’s professional dealings with agents and publishers and her friendships with prominent literary figures of the time including Eudora Welty, Frank O’Connor, William Maxwell and John McGahern. Gráinne Hurley’s first book offers fascinating insight into the lives and careers of two mid-twentieth-centurywomen, working on either side of the Atlantic and inhabiting the small but hallowed world of literary publishing. It reveals how their fortunate union and combined love for the written word produced some of Lavin’s finest work.

Fighting off the boredom of lockdown, acclaimed author Jim Winter decides to share his skills by setting up an anonymous online writing workshop – but his generosity will cost him more than he knows. Right away, the work of a talented student known only as Deirdre stands out. Her novel concerns the death of Mattie Lantry, a lonely seventeen-year-old found murdered in the now-distant summer of 1980, in the local cemetery of his quiet fishing town. The writing is brilliant, but there’s one problem: Jim grew up with Mattie, and Deirdre knows things that only he and his schoolfriends should know. Chapter by chapter, she’s revealing a story that he’s worked all his life to repress. Who is Deirdre, and what will her novel uncover? To find out, Jim must return to the town he fled all those years ago. As his buried past and perfect present collide, the stories he’s told about his own nature – to his reading public, to his loved ones and to himself – begin to fall apart.