The Lilliput Press Ltd

Charlotte Brontë dazzled the world with some of literature’s most vital, richly-drawn characters. She spent her brief but extraordinary life in search of love – and eventually found it with Arthur Bell Nicholls, her father’s curate, a reserved yet passionate Irishman. The pair honeymooned in Ireland, though their joy was quenched nine months later when Charlotte died in March 1855. The aura of mystery surrounding the enigmatic author was only to intensify after her death. Charlotte is the story of two marriages and three lives irrevocably intertwined, told by the woman who went on to wed Brontë’s widower. Theirs was a love triangle of devotion and heartache, friendship and deception, passion and obsession. Martina Devlin’s enthralling novel re-envisions Charlotte’s pivotal time in Ireland, weaving back and forth through the novelist’s life and afterlife. It reflects upon the myths built up by those who knew her, those who thought they did, and those who longed to.  ‘I was utterly enthralled by this fictional rendering of Charlotte Brontë's life—and its aftermath—as viewed through the eyes of her husband's second wife. This is a powerful and compelling novel that expertly imagines the lives and times of those closest to Brontë, and captivates the reader with its cleverness and eloquence.’ Mary Costello ‘In Charlotte, the raw gold of Charlotte Brontë’s marriage to Arthur Nicholls has been wrought in a wonderful artefact; this is a beautiful novel full of mystery, intrigue and story.’ Carlo Gébler

Christine Beckett is faced with some home truths when her best friend, suffering from dementia, decides after a lifetime to be honest with her; Olivia Fletcher has an epiphany at a vaccination centre about a man who has loved her for decades; Bernard Travers revisits an unlikely romantic interlude with the mother of his teenage pen pal that has sustained him for 40 years. Twenty-Twenty Vision is a collection of interlinked short stories about hindsight and late middle-age regret subtly framed within the first year of the pandemic. It’s also a portrait, an emotional map of the 1950s generation moving into the third age with a mixture of apprehension and regret. The characters make chastening discoveries – one finds after a lifetime that she’s a bullying victim, another draws up a curriculum vitae of her emotional life when there are no jobs left to apply for. The work focuses on a handful of characters – Christine, Olivia, Bernard, Freddie, Triona and Eva – as they revisit their past and grapple with late-life perspectives. The overarching narrative is connected by character and situation, and united in theme, to form a tapestry of late middle-age reckoning.

‘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.

First published in 1973 and swiftly banned, John Broderick’s An Apology for Roses returns as one of the most audacious portraits of provincial Ireland ever written. Set in a midlands town where respectability masks obsession, corruption and thwarted desire, the novel follows the intersecting lives of Marie Fogarty – clever, restless, dangerously sure of her own charm – and Father Tom Moran, the charismatic curate drawn into her orbit. Around them spin the claustrophobic rituals of family, gossip, religion and commerce: suffocating drawing-rooms heated to excess, whispered devotions, clandestine meetings in lakeside chalets, nights of hunger, fear, exhilaration and betrayal. Broderick exposes the hypocrisies of Irish Catholic life with wit, psychological acuity and a fearless eye for the erotic and the grotesque. A novel banned in its own time for its frankness, An Apology for Roses stands now as a darkly glittering masterpiece, bold, unsettling, and unforgettably alive.

Long overlooked but now recognised as a quietly radical masterpiece, The Waking of Willie Ryan reveals John Broderick as one of the most incisive chroniclers of mid-century Ireland. Set in a midlands town where beauty and brutality uneasily coexist, the novel follows the return of Willie Ryan – once scapegoated for his relationships with men, institutionalised, and written out of local memory – who comes home to die and, in doing so, unsettles the pieties that once destroyed him.  Broderick’s portrait of Willie is unforgettably tender: a gay man whose dignity, vulnerability and refusal ‘to serve’ expose the hypocrisies of a society built on fear. Through crystalline prose and an unsparing eye, Broderick maps the forces – clerical authority, bourgeois respectability, inherited shame – that shaped Irish life in the 1960s.  A pioneering exploration of queer Irish experience and a devastating critique of provincial cruelty, The Waking of Willie Ryan stands alongside the great modern Irish novels for its moral clarity, elegance, and emotional force.

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.

Martin Doyle, Books Editor of The Irish Times, has been an arts journalist for more than 35 years and in that time has interviewed many of the most talented and successful Irish writers at different stages of their careers. This selection of his journalism offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of the Irish literary world as it has evolved in the past four decades. It provides booklovers with a privileged insight into the creative processes of many of their favourite writers, while serving as an appetiser for some of the greatest works of modern Irish fiction and nonfiction, both prizewinning titles and some overlooked gems which deserve to be rediscovered. Writers interviewed include: Sally Rooney, Anne Enright, Claire Keegan, Roddy Doyle, Colm Tóibín, Claire Kilroy, Donal Ryan, Alice Taylor, Paul Murray. 'I'm not a great reader of writers' interviews. Writers so often lie when the truth's not intriguing enough. Martin Doyle, however, is a canny, immensely well-prepared, fastidious and intuitive interrogator. He extracts remarkable witness out of these remarkable Irish writers. Read one interview per night. It'll keep you awake.' Richard Ford'A brilliantly illuminative journey into some piercing literary minds.' Books Ireland Magazine

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.

Set across liminal landscapes, this collection of fourteen stories from award-winning author Niamh Mac Cabe feature characters navigating emotional or existential thresholds—grieving, seeking meaning, or reconciling with the past. Whether it is a reclusive sculptor haunted by guilt, a lost child drawing maps in the sand, or a greyhound silently shadowing a man to a mountain lake, Mac Cabe’s lyrical prose and inventive narrative structures evoke an eerie, tender intimacy. Rich and atmospheric, exploring themes of memory, solitude, loss, and the mysterious rhythms of nature and human connection, this collection blurs the line between the internal and external world, and invites us into spaces of beauty, melancholy and subtle transformation. Four Night Seas marks the arrival of a vital new voice in Irish writing.

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.

Julie McDermot has just been released from ‘The Mental’, the psychiatric institution where her husband committed her after the devastating loss of their two infant children. Returning to her narrow, lonely life along the canal, Julie is haunted by grief and the aching absence of what might have been. As she struggles to piece herself back together, an unexpected encounter with a stranger along the canal offers a glimmer of connection and the fragile possibility of hope. Their encounter also brings long-submerged realities to the surface, to a place where they can no longer be ignored; exploring Ireland’s dark history of institutional incarceration and offering a profound glimpse of hopein a stunning portrait of a woman’s life. Moving and deeply evocative, this novel is a powerful meditation on sorrow, isolation, and the surprising ways joy can return to even the most broken heart.

This fully illustrated and authorised history marks fifty years of one of Ireland’s most ground-breaking and successful theatrical ensembles. Founded in 1975, Druid is a touring theatre company, anchored in the West of Ireland and looking to the world. Druid began as a bold idea: to create Ireland’s first professional theatre company outside of Dublin. There were few resources with which to achieve such an undertaking in the West of Ireland in 1975. Through sheer dedication, and with the support of the Galway community, founders Garry Hynes, Marie Mullen and Mick Lally – alongside a protean ensemble of actors, crew and supporters – made this bold idea a reality. That reality has since become an international success story of extraordinary dimensions. In this comprehensive history of the company, Patrick Lonergan weaves together decades of personal stories, archival material, anecdotes, memories and performances into a fascinating and illuminating portrait of one of the most vital institutions in Ireland’s theatrical landscape.

Featuring 100 captivating portraits of many of Ireland’s greatest contemporary writers, alongside conversations with each on their writing life, Scribendi is a landmark book of portraits of Irish writers by internationally renowned photographer Steve Pyke. ‘I come from the English Midlands, but I became a photographer in Ireland. I made my first portraits in Dublin in the early 1980s. It was immediately apparent to me then how important Irish writers are to their country, in a way I never saw in England or elsewhere. One of my earliest portrait sessions was in 1983, with the writer Neil Jordan in my first studio in London. I’ve gone on for the subsequent forty years photographing the Irish writers whose books have excited me. Early sitters include Seamus Heaney, Edna O’Brien and John McGahern. More recent trips have led me to the next generation, such writers as Anne Enright, Kevin Barry and Louise Kennedy. I photographed these people because I had read their books and admired and wanted to meet them, and also to make a record for posterity. Their faces can bring to others something of the feeling and way of thinking behind their words.’ Steve Pyke is one of the world’s most renowned portrait photographers, has published 10 books to date, including the critically acclaimed novel I Could Read the Sky with Timothy O’Grady, and has worked among many other roles, as resident portrait photographer for The New Yorker from 2004-2014.

Businessman Fenton Conville has it all sewn up, coasting through life with his mates and his money in a sleepy Northern Irish village. Until, that is, he wakes on his fiftieth birthday to an unexpected solicitor’s letter and a shocking allegation that could blow his world apart. In this sharp-eyed comedy of memories, middle age and long-buried mistakes, a privileged entrepreneur feels the chill winds of post-Brexit change in a society struggling to account for its past. Ultimately, Injury Time is a poignant, acerbic look at a man out of sync with the world around him. Kevin Smith’s prose is by turns hilarious and incisive, blending satire with a genuine exploration of aging, masculinity, and the slow erosion of certainty. This is a story about dodging bullets, literal and metaphorical, and the painful comedy of life’s second half. In the end, Fenton’s true struggle is less about money or status than finding relevance and peace as the clock runs down. 'A marvellous cast of characters ... It’s hard to know what more could be asked of this winning piece of work.' - Pat Carty, Irish Independent

Skilled portraits in miniature set in Dublin and London: masterful character sketches by one of Ireland’s most observant writers. Although these are separate stories, they form chapters in a man’s life. He knows the characters - in Dublin, the West of Ireland, London, provincial England- and they know him. His descriptions are intimate, sympathetic but their lives are sharply drawn. A young Muslim woman moves to a Dublin Street; a married man meets a married woman to make up for a failed night of their youth; a London woman keeps a window open to remind herself that suicide is available. Through each story the overarching narrator also becomes clearer: we see the tension between who he is and the pull of what might have been. As conclusions bring opposites together, in this book, Time is the great character. These are timeless, classic Irish short stories in the vein of William Trevor and Brian Friel, poised and carefully observed vignettes of the lives that compose modern Ireland.

SET IN DUBLIN’S LIBERTIES, Estelle Birdy’s explosively original debut Ravelling channels the energies and agonies of young men let loose in the city, their city, navigating the tumultuous trajectory of youth and young manhood, where they balance their hopes with the harsh realities of their present. Hurtling between friendships, feuds, drug-deals, family and brushes with the law, this is modern Dublin as never before portrayed. Ravelling follows Deano, a weed-smoking hurling star, living with his aunt in an about-to-be-demolished flat; Hamza, a Pakistani Muslim atheist and precocious academic, who sells his ADHD drugs to the kids in a private school; Oisín, empathetic and iron-willed, who has begun to see his dead brother at the end of his bed; Congolese nature lover, Benit, who just wants to relax and hurl with the lads; Karl, a maybe-gay fashionista, dreaming of something better while immersing himself in his art. Bound by friendship, place and the memories of those who’ve died too soon, these young men grapple with race, class, sex, parties, poverty, violence and Garda harassment, all while wondering what it means to be a man in twenty-first century Ireland. ‘Ravelling masterfully evokes the fragility and beauty of human relationships. It’s funny, bold and bursting with love. There’s no moral here, just an ode to community, a burning sense of youth and a plea for a society pushed to the margins.’ KARL GEARY‘A glorious novel, tough and hilarious and full of heart. What a writer! Every line sings from the page.’ DONAL RYAN ‘Written in fluent, truthful prose, with humour and empathy abounding.’ SEBASTIAN BARRY ‘A brilliantly profane, hilarious ride through the Liberties … Ravelling lays a sparkling new Dublin over the old. A revelation.’ LAUREN MACKENZIE