The Lilliput Press: 235 books

This guide to the 'forgotten stones' of early ecclesiastical sites and buildings is a lovingly detailed record of 82 churches secreted in the hundred-odd square miles of the Burren, a primeval limestones region of north County Clare, one heavily populated, encapsulating Ireland's Christian heritage....

'In the summer of 1939, as a two-year-old in London, I was given away by my parents to a Chelsea friend and taken on the Irish Mail to Dublin.' Thus begins this extraordinary memoir by travel writer and novelist Joseph Hone, one of eight children farmed out by impecunious and inebriate parents, who...

'A classic; of his mastery of language there can be no doubt'- Anthony Burgess. This paperback reissue of 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...

Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-73) was a highly original author of fantastic fiction - novels and short stories - and a key in Irish conservative poitics during the first half o the Victorian age. This outstanding biography, appearing in a new paperback edition with fresh appendix matter, explores the contradictions...

This sparkling memoir gives a personal view of Irish rural life from the Economic War of the 1930s to the farming boom and recession of the 1970s. It describes the upbringing of a Protestant only child on a farm near Nenagh in north Tipperary-an idyll interrupted by school in Dublin during the 1940s....

The Valley of the Squinting Windows (1918), Brinsley MacNamara's first published novel, so enraged the Westmeath community in which he lived that the book was publicly burned, its author humiliated and his father, the local schoolteacher, boycotted and driven into exile. MacNamara (1890-1963) was...

Like J.M. Synge almost a century before him, Tim Robinson portrays the inner and outer life of a landscape and its inhabitants. Encyclopedia of myth and reality, herbal, love-letter, missal, jest-book, anthology of cultural responses - Stones of Aran juggles modes from page to page. Its apparent inexhaustibility...

Synge's topographical essays appear here in their original newspaper and periodical publication form, taken from the Manchester Guardian, The Gael and The Shanachie, complete with illustrations, mostly by Jack B. Yeats. A substantial essay-introduction by Nicholas Grene places his work in its historical...

'Stone of Aran: Pilgrimmage' is, as Robert Macfarlane says in his introduction, 'one of the msot sustained, intensive and imaginative studies of a place that has ever been carried out.' That place is one of the most mysterious and oldest inhabited landscapes in the world, the islands of Aran off the...

With a foreword by J.P. Donleavy. The best book about literary Dublin ever written' - FRANK DELANEY. Edna O'Brien chose John Ryan's memoirs as her Observer Book of the Year in 1975, describing it as a fine and loving account of literary Dublin in the golden fifties', which purrs with life and anecdote'....

Richard Hayward was one of Ireland's best-loved cultural figures of the mid-twentieth century. A popular Irish travel writer, actor and singer, he led an intense and productive life, leaving behind a remarkable body of work through his writing and recordings. However, since his death in a car crash...

"A Delicate Wildness: The Life and Loves of David Thomson' is a must read." -Michael McDowell SC, Irish Independent. David Thompson was a Scottish writer, folklorist and radio producer, who became an honorary Irishman. His life took a defining turn when he came to County Roscommon...

A mesmerizing new biography of explorer Ernest Shackleton, lavishly illustrated with over a hundred photographs, maps and engravings, some of them appearing in print for the first time. Eighty years after his death, the extraordinary story of Endurance South Pole expedition still holds a compelling...

Dublin Made Me, the first of C.S. ('Todd') Andrews' two celebrated volumes of autobiography, describes in loving detail the pre-independence Dublin in which the author grew up and provides a vivid participant's account of the War of Independence and the Civil War. Born in 1901, Andrews lived with...