Books by Dermot Bolger

A widow spends weeks haunting a cemetery, desperate to track down an unknown woman who keeps leaving flowers on her husband’s grave; A daughter searches a foreign city for her father, trying to understand why he disappeared forty-five years ago; A former gay lover of Roger Casement stands among the crowds at his state funeral in 1965, paying silent homage to the closeted world they were forced to inhabit at the dawning of the Irish State. A writer at a book launch comes face to face with the person secretly responsible for his success.Lyrical, haunting and irresistible, Dermot Bolger peers under the veneer of our lives, exploring the secrets that bind families together or tear them apart. Perfect for fans of Claire Keegan, John MaGahern, and Sef Hughes.Born in Finglas, North Dublin, in 1959, Dermot Bolger is one of Ireland’s best-known writers across a range of genres. His fourteen novels include "The Journey Home", "The Family on Paradise Pier", "New Town Soul2, "Tanglewood" and "The Lonely Sea and Sky." He is also an accomplished playwright and poet, with his most recent play, "Last Orders At The Dockside", having a hugely successful, sold-out run at the Abbey Theatre.

Following a car crash, for several seconds Dublin photographer Sean Blake is clinically dead but finds his progress towards the afterworld blocked by a haunting face he only partially recognises. Restored to a miraculous second chance at life ΓÇô he feels profoundly changed. He is haunted by not knowing who he truly is because this is not the first time he has been given a second life. At six weeks old he was taken from his birth mother, a young girl forced to give him up for adoption. Now he knows that until he unlocks the truth about his origins, he will be a stranger to his wife, to his children and to himself.Struggling against a wall of official silence and a complex sense of guilt, Sean determines to find his birth mother, embarking on an absorbing journey into archives, memories, dreams and startling confessions.The first modern novel to address the scandal of Irish Magdalene laundries when it was published in 1994, A Second Life continued to haunt BolgerΓÇÖs imagination. He has never allowed its republication until he felt ready to retell the story in a new and even more compelling way. This reimagined text is therefore neither an old novel nor a new one, but a completely ΓÇÿrenewedΓÇÖ novel, that grows towards a spelling-binding, profoundly moving conclusion.

A bawdy, vibrant and tumultuous adaptation of James Joyce's classic.It's Ulysses as you've never imagined it before, a superbly theatrical homage to Joyce's chronicle of Dublin life and the greatest novel of all time.

'Each story stands alone but also makes up the vivid picture of life in Dublin's newly refurbished Finbar's Hotel . . . funny and poignant' Sunday Mirror 'Finbar's Hotel is back, this time with a stellar cast of women writers and a lick of paint . . . But what's it all about? Well, it would be all too easy to give the game away, so let's just say that there's a hilarious reworking of the old immaculate conception theme, a bittersweet confrontation between a daughter and her loopy father, a poignant encounter involving a long-married couple, and a cracking finish . . . it doesn't matter who wrote what: together they've produced a playful, light, highly entertaining book' Irish Times 'Beneath the humour, whimsy and outright craziness, Ladies' Night at Finbar's Hotel hits at the shallowness of current social pretensions and offers a cautious optimism about women's lives today' Times Literary Supplement

An ordinary man is forced to confront both his own demons and the manifestation of the supernatural beyond his comprehension and control

This is the first collection of the plays of Dermot Bolger, seen as at the cutting edge of Irish writing as a playwright, novelist, poet and editor.