James Lawless: 17 books

A scantily-dressed girl dancing in a lighted window jolts Francis Copeland from his world of books. Francis, now approaching middleage, whose life and marriage are in a rut, fantasises about the girl and finds it hard to accept, as he discovers later, that she is Judy, a dancer in the local pub. The...

A vulnerable bachelor is blackmailed sexually.Knowing Women is observationally and psychologically acute. It is also a lot of fun. You knew this middle aged graphics artist with an Eastern European bisexual lap dancer girl friend was headed for trouble and I enjoyed observing his tribulations. I recommend...

What is noise? What happens when it gets inside your head? In his hilarious story marked with pathos Sound Reflections James Lawless sends up in his typical humorous fashion some of the effects of sounds on contemporary society, and this is followed by his unremittingly dark poem Noise which explores the devastation uncontrolled cacophony can inflict on sensitive individuals.

Thirty three year old romance novelist Penelope Eames moves to Spain to avoid her oppressive father and drug-addicted brother, Dermot. When she meets Ramón, a young Spanish school teacher, she is immediately attracted to him and feels the happiness that eluded her all her life may at last be hers....

Winner of the WOW Award for fiction. ‘Lovers Who Wound Blame it on the Storm shows how a talented writer can take the framework of an erotic love fixation and turn it into art by infusing it with a bona fide sense of character, motive and atmosphere.’ The Judges on the WOW Award.

Jo Jo is an endearing but sometimes mischievous little girl of eight years. She has a great imagination. She can talk to animals and she loves the woods where many of her adventures take place. Find out how the deer Rudolf got his red nose or what a crab turns into at the seaside or what happens to...

The mean streets of Dublin and powers that be lurking. A man known to wear a wig in his exemplary life roams the dark streets of the city exploiting the weak and vulnerable. And who is the hooded figure who has to pick up the pieces for him, perpetuating the age-old problem?

Shortlisted for the Willesden Prize, Jolt is a story about perception and ingrained prejudices that we can carry around with us in our everyday lives. Sometimes it can take a journey to a strange place to waken us into a less intransigent way of seeing the world.

When Laura Calane of New York comes to Ireland to further her studies and to live in what her father considers a safer environment after 9/11, she discovers that the land of her ancestors is not the haven she had believed it to be. When she meets social worker Danny Faraday, she is torn between her...

A journalist in Spain, avoiding his unhappy marriage, meets up with a mysterious sex-hungry lady on the run from her eventual nemesis.

When university student Guido van Thool accidentally bumps into the beautiful ballerina Anna Zweig in Loti’s café, it sets them off on a whirlwind romance of ballet concerts, anti-globalisation marches and love trysts in bluebell woods. Even when Guido is called away for military service, time...

Hennessy Award nominated story of an impressionable young man's hitchhiking journey through France in 1968 during the time of the Sorbonne riots where he encounters predatory sex and tastes the delights of elusive love.

During a long hot summer a young man, inspired by Bobby Darin's Dream Lover, becomes infatuated with a beautiful girl only to make an emotionally-wrenching discovery.

Peeling Oranges tells the story of how Derek Foley, while sifting through his late father's diaries and his mother's correspondence with an IRA man, discovers that Patrick Foley, a diplomat in Franco's Spain, was not really his father. Derek's mother, who is ailing, is unwilling...