Bøger udgivet af New Island Books

Caitriona Lally's sophomore novel centres around an outsider protagonist, Roy, an Irishman exiled from Ireland to Hamburg for unknown reasons. In his new, simple life he works as a cleaner at the Wunderland miniature exhibition where he is more comfortable meddling in the tiny scenes than he is in interacting with his co-workers and visitors to the museum.To Roy's almost total indifference, his sister Gert visits for a few days, the first of their family to do so since his exile, and she patiently and then not-so-patiently tries to talk to him and discover what really prompted his move away. But Gert is fighting her own demons, having checked out of her exhausting family life where she is losing herself in the face of her husband's deepening depression.Latent forces within brother and sister explode to force them to do something - anything - to change their stagnant and bewildering lives.

We Seldom Talk About the Past is John MacKenna's first selected collection of short stories, from a career spanning over three decades. The stories selected come from four collections of short fiction, and represent a culmination of MacKenna's work in a form of writing he has made uniquely his own. Often compared to John McGahern, and Raymond Carver, and deeply influenced by masters of the form like Chekov, MacKenna's stories focus on the quotidian truths of our lives, of the momentousness of small moments, of sexual desire and its intimate entanglement with the domestic, of deeply felt absences and social mores, and always at the heart of his work, the sense of place, often the rural, and the acute receptiveness of our lives to the places we inhabit.

New updated edition of the seminal work by Catherine Dunne, which charted the lives of the London Irish, in all their variety and colour, now with a brand new foreword by Diarmaid Ferriter. Half a million Irish people left Ireland in the nineteen-fifties, forced by decades of economic stagnation. For many, Britain was their only hope of survival.

When football players leave Ireland behind in the hopes of carving out a future in the professional game, they often end up plying their trade in the UK -competing for a chance in the Premier League, the Scottish Premiership, or the numerous leagues below them.For decades, this has been the most attractive and obvious career path for Irish players. But what of those players who ventured further afield in search of glory, adventure, or simply their next touch of the ball?Since the dawn of the men's professional game well over a century ago, and up to the more recent expansion of women's football, Irish players - and coaches too - have made their mark on clubs and nations around the world. For the first time, Emerald Exiles brings together the stories of these pioneering players, who pursue football wherever they can, venturing beyond tradition and navigating the personal and professional highs and lows that journey brings with it.Charting the careers of players and managers such as Liam Brady, Robbie Keane, Anne O'Brien, Stephanie Roche, Frank Stapleton and a host of others - and featuring exclusive first-hand interviews with numerous players, Emerald Exiles is a unique analysis of Ireland's mark on world football and the individual stories behind it.

The New Frontier is a landmark publication of writing from the Irish Border, a chorus of voices from some of the island's greatest writers, that conveys in its multiplicity the true meaning of our border, and of borders in general.

POEMS AND ILLUSTRATIONS INSPIRED BY LOCKDOWNBefore the COVID-19 global pandemic, Dubliner Jan was working as a freelance fashion stylist and creative director. Now, she is an experienced homeschool teacher, playground chaperone, cook, cleaner, fed-up walker and kitchen disco DJ. At the height of the restrictions, Jan's own internal dialogue finally tumbled onto the page. The result is this book of poems: raw, honest and funny observations on family and relationships, on feeling a bit crap and being perfectly imperfect.Jan's lyrical writings offer a fresh perspective on modern life, written with humour, heart and honesty.What Day Is It? Who gives a f*ck expresses all the rage, loss,fun and love that have stunned and occupied us since March 2020.

Social media is a new type of public space that has revolutionised the way women express themselves, placing the power of representation in female hands like no technology before. But this increased visibility looks both ways, with the gazed upon also gazing back through platforms designed for judgement and surveillance.A man-made tool, social media is now deeply entwined with women's lives in an always-on culture where new and intrusive forms of comparison, shaming and watchfulness are completely normalised and women's bodies, minds and emotions are picked apart. While many are acutely aware of this 'visibility trap', taking ownership of it remains a minefield.In The Visibility Trap, Mary McGill blends feminism, media studies and lived experiences to explore the contradictions and dangers of online visibility for women, asking how we can build better, safer digital spaces for all. From current research to real-life testimonies, via the Kardashian Industrial Complex (KIC) to image-based sexual abuse - 'revenge porn' - and its belated criminalisation, she offers urgent and welcome insights into using social media more consciously, powerfully and positively. This is a must-read for anyone who loves or hates social media; for the guardians of future social media users and for anyone else who is still half-on, half-off this most twenty-first century of obsessions.

After her father's death in exile, Antigone returns to Thebes determined to set the record straight and restore her father's reputation. Tracing the histories of Oedipus and his parents Laius and Jocasta, as well as the peripheral characters of the plays who had a central role in him fulfilling his destiny, Antigone's 'biography' causes us to re-evaluate the extent to which any of us can be entirely blamed for the actions by which we will be defined. Ending with Antigone making a conscious choice to reclaim her brother's corpse from the battlefield, an act of defiance which will guarantee her own death, the book ultimately meditates on the illusion of free will, and the warning that context is everything, I, ANTIGONE will be a major contribution to the reclaimed classics.

A gorgeously produced homage to the art of the letter, comprising letters to and from the Presidents of Ireland.

The Garden is dying. Once an Edenic orchid farm, it has been decimated by the worst hurricane in Florida's living memory. Its glasshouses are shattered, the surrounding mangroves encroach, and its men are dangerously idle. When Romeo - an expert breeder of the endangered ghost orchid - arrives from Honduras, boss Blanchard and his Irish lieutenant, Swallow, believe their fortunes are on the rise.Romeo may not be all he seems though, and Swallow can sense the newcomer shaking the Garden's creaking hierarchy. The ghost orchid they seek is infamously rare, a delicate and wildly valuable species, hidden deep in the treacherous cypress swamps of the Fakahatchee Strand. To capture the ghost, Blanchard and Swallow must strike a deal with Logan, a dangerously unpredictable member of the local Seminole tribe, whose wounded pride, and simmering web of violence threaten to uproot any hope of success. As Blanchard's obsession distracts him from what is truly precious, Swallow's long-buried traumas will test his ability to stop lust, betrayal and death from engulfing the Garden.Paul Perry's first solo novel tells of smothering power, loyalty and agency thwarted by the tragic patterns of memory and behaviour. The Garden is a modern fable, and a warning against trespassing upon nature in the name of profit.

Honest and heartbreaking literary memoir of the lives of two Irish writers, from the thunderbolt of love to receding into dementia and remaining the greatest of companions throughout. All his life he was obsessed by memory: 'Is the memory of things better than the things themselves?'

Michael O'Loughlin was seven years old when the Irish trade union movement replaced its headquarters, Liberty Hall - the starting point of the 1916 Rising - with Ireland's first skyscraper. This bold, seventeen-storey Liberty Hall expressed an aspiration towards the modernity which its builders envisaged as the birthright of future generations. Since then, as one of Dublin's most iconic buildings, Liberty Hall has cast a personal and political light on the lives of citizens passing below, and formed the backdrop to O'Loughlin's earliest childhood memories.In this remarkable new book - a highly original fusion of poetry, visual images and prose memoirs - Liberty Hall becomes both a real and imaginary space, a physical building and a state of mind in which to be free; a place where the boundaries between verbal and visual, poetry and prose, past and present, city and suburb, local and global, all become fluid. It is a book of numerous journeys: the ritualised crossing of the Liffey from North to South and back again; travels around European cities; and into O'Loughlin's own family history in the first difficult century of the Irish state. He explores the emotional weather through memory, cinema and architecture, arriving in the end at Liberty Hall.

An engaging history of the Irish revolutionary period, now in paperback for the first time.

In early 2018 the Facebook page In Her Shoes: Women of the Eighth began as an art project with the intention to change undecided voters' minds in the upcoming referendum on the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution. The grassroots project posted anonymous stories of the negative impacts of the Eighth Amendment alongside a simple photo of a pair of shoes. In the five months from its creation to the referendum vote on 25 May 2018, the page grew over 115,000 followers with an organic reader reach of over four million per week. RTÉ reported that it was 'stories in the media' that influenced 43 per cent of voters to vote Yes.Out of the thousand stories sent to In Her Shoes, Erin Darcy has selected thirty-two as a representation of the entire island of Ireland. The anonymous stories are reproduced with their authors' consent and remain in their original words. By preserving these stories within this book, we enshrine women's experiences in history where are often written out. In Her Shoes is the story of a changing social landscape, of an uprising within the author and within Ireland.Fully illustrated by the author, this book will speak to the historical importance of women's storytelling and include a collection of 32 stories, representing the 32 counties on the island of Ireland.

During his all-too-brief lifetime, Flann O'Brien was read by a small but fanatically faithful coterie of readers, including James Joyce, Dylan Thomas, Graham Greene, and William Saroyan. He is one of the most difficult writers to pin down, partly or primarily as a result of his having carefully carved himself into three people, all of whom he used, when necessary, to hide behind. As Flann O'Brien he wrote several novels that for their technical precocity, exuberant prose, and sparking invention, have been proclaimed among the finest of the modern period; as Myles na Gopaleen ("Miles of the Little Ponies") he wrote for twenty-five years a wildly imaginative newspaper column for The Irish Times called Cruiskeen Lawn; as Brian O'Nolan, the name on his birth certificate, he held down a responsible job in the bureaucracy of the Irish Government. No Laughing Matter is the first full-length biography of this remarkable man.

Comprising four long stories - 'The Becker Wives', 'The Joy Ride', 'A Happy Death' and 'Magenta' - this collection is one of Lavin's most celebrated. Together, these stories capture the frustrations and grace of characters struggling to free themselves in places that are often hostile to their desires: a new bride coming home to her husband's prim family, two butlers taking a rare opportunity to go out drinking, a woman pleading with her dying husband to repent, and a young housekeeper whose fortunes seem to have suddenly changed.For the first time in decades, and with a foreword by Christine Dwyer Hickey, the Modern Irish Classics series brings this vital collection to a new generation of readers.