New Island Books: 96 books

A dippy photographer shoots talking donkeys and invisible strangers. A professor who in his youth vowed to kill Ian Paisley has so far failed to do so. A brash young journalist wants the local paper to save the world, but the editor prefers football. Only a thin veil separates the world we think we...

Comprised of four short 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...

When Father Aengus Cornelius Finucane entered a room, his entrance was noted. When he held court at one of his parties, the focus was on him. When he addressed a gathering, made a case to a Prime Minister or importuned a new Concern donor, his audience listened. In this powerful new biography, the...

Before the ‘Ryanair Generation’, leaving home was for good. Half a million Irish men and women left these shores in the nineteen-fifties, forced by decades of economic stagnation to make their lives elsewhere. For many of these emigrants, mostly young and unskilled, Britain was their only hope...

Nuala Ní Chonchúir's characters and their relationships have about them that most precious and elusive quality: the ring of truth.' - Gerard Stembridge Lillis leaves behind 1990s Dublin for a summer job working at a lodge in a small lochside village in the Scottish Highlands. Leaving Dublin is a...

Hitler’s Irish Slaves tells the shocking story of 32 merchant seamen from Ireland who were held in conditions of great hardship in an SS slave labour camp from 1943 to 1945. Mercilessly punished for their refusal to join the German war effort, and ignored by their own government, they became part...

The Lockout, the 1916 Rising, the War of Independence and the Civil War. Events we hear a lot about packed into just a very few years, barely over a decade. But what did they mean, what forces gave rise to them, how did Ireland go from welcoming royalty in 1912 to independence in 1922? In this exciting...

From Ireland, England, France, Austria, Greece, Turkey and Italy to America and the West Indies, overflowing with historic events, from the French Revolution to the Great Irish Famine, with a cast of the famous and infamous, Howe Peter Browne, 2nd Marquess of Sligo, lived life to the absolute limits. Privileged...

Hard Border goes to the very roots of the Irish boundary where, after decades of division and conflict, a fragile peace has prevailed since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Post-Brexit, it will re-emerge as the only land frontier between the United Kingdom and the European Union*.* In...

Every trouble on this earth is caused by a man's ability to stay quietly at home...' Willy Regan, son and carer of his blind mother, Moll, is the questionable narrator of this tale of petty doing, coming of age and falls from grace. Freed from the drudgery of his humdrum life, following Moll's death,...

In Mother America and other stories mothers tattoo their children and abduct them; they act as surrogates and they use charms to cure childhood illnesses. The story ‘Letters’ sees an Irish mother cling to love of her son, though he abandoned her in New York, where loneliness is alleviated only...

‘Getting sex advice from Irish nuns was like getting dental hygiene tips from Shane McGowan . . . ’ The journey from Peig Sayers to Miram O’Callaghan has been arduous. In Irish Bitches Be Crazy, Emma Comerford shines her provocative and entertaining light on the sometimes erratic psyche of the...

Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh was a founder actress of the Abbey Theatre and its first leading lady on its opening in 1904, when she played the title role in W. B. Yeats’s Kathleen Ni Houlihan. On that night, five members of her family were acting and working in the theatre. Her beauty and talent captivated...

In this debut collection, Donna Sørensen writes poetry for a new generation. She writes about belonging and the feel of different places, as well she might an Englishwoman who now lives in Denmark and who worked for three years in Ireland. Her imagery is rooted deeply in natural experiences and alive...