Books published by New Island Books

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

Not the Final Word publishes for the first time, in both Irish and English, the 1952 St Anne's Hospital recordings of Peig Sayers, made by a team from the Irish Folklore Commission.

Published for the first time in the Irish language, previous Open Door stories by literary superstars Roddy Doyle, Marian Keyes, John Connolly, Deirdre Purcell, Julie Parsons, Vincent Banville, Maeve Binchy and Patricia Scanlan have now been released in a special edition - as Gaeilge!

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.

Guardians of the Peace is a political history of the Irish police force, An Garda Siochana, from its foundation at the birth of the Irish State, through the Irish Civil War, the threat of the fascist 'Blueshirts', the continuing campaign of the IRA, de Valera's entry into the Dail in 1932 and the creation, effectively of his own police force - 'The Broy Harriers' - through World War 2.As the author outlines in his insightful introduction, the story told in this book is part of a longer and wider narrative. But it is a story which still has relevance as Ireland moves, hopefully, to a new era of peace and stability. It is above all a chronicle of the idealism and the imperfections of ordinary men presented by history with the discharging of a rather extraordinary task.As the force approaches one hundred years since its founding, it is hoped that this history will evoke the ideals and the founding principles adopted in 1922 and perhaps help to re-interpret and re-apply them in a 21st Century context.

Tugann Labharfad le Cach le cheile den chead uair na taifeadtai a thog an BBC agus RTE uaithi i 1946, 1947 agus 1953, mar aon le haistriuchain Bhearla orthu. | I Will Speak to You All collects, for the first time, in both Irish and English, the recordings made by the BBC and RTE of Peig Sayers in 1946, 1947 and 1953.

In the Ubari Sand Sea in 2011, during the First Libyan Civil War, a mysterious pilot falls from the sky - a sky devil - and is forever changed by the little boy who rescues him.One year later, in the town of Roseville, Louisiana, in the aftermath of economic crisis and corporate environmental damage, 10-year-old Lenny Lockhart is losing the people and things dearest to him. His only friends now are his plucky, elderly neighbour, Miss Julie, and the town's lonely librarian, Lucy Albert. Homeless and neglected, Lenny heads deep into the dark and unpredictable bayou, determined to conquer the sinkhole that is threatening to swallow his town. As time seems to be simultaneously slowing down and running out, is it really Lenny who needs saving, or the broken adults in his life?As these two timelines converge, Lenny tells a deeply affecting story of family and love, the ways we can be kind, and the power of one boy's imagination to heal and survive.

The Glass Shore: Short Stories by Women Writers from the North of Ireland, compiled by Sinead Gleeson, provides an intimate and illuminating insight into an underappreciated literary canon. Twenty-four female luminaries from the north of Ireland capture experiences that are both vivid and varied, despite their shared geographical heritage.

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.

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?'

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