MOTHER OF PEARL, the first novel by an acclaimed Irish short-story writer, explores the disturbing territory of the divided self. Through the story of the kidnapping of a baby, the notion of personal history as received fiction is examined. The novel asks: what makes a family? Is it mere kinship through blood, or something more profound and intricate? What keeps it together? What tears it apart? The action of the novel is seen through the eyes of a baby's mother, the kidnapper and the chil...

'a wonderful book from one of our finest writers' Colum McCannBella is a bright, clever girl who trains as a school teacher, determined to escape the limitations of her genteel impoverishment and become a "mistress of her own life". However, the manager of her school, the Rev Archibald Leeper, a married clergyman, develops a morbid attachment to her, which is to colour the rest of her life. Leeper places Bella in an untenable position; her only escape is to seduce ...

‘A wonderful writer’ Hilary MantelAll of life is laid bare in Prosperity Drive. A woman falls and remembers a moment decades earlier that changed the course of her life. A failed priest teaches children to swim at the YMCA. A teenage girl takes a spanner to the car of the young man who has driven her home. A honeymoon in Venice goes disastrously wrong. A man is reunited with his first love in an airport departure lounge**.** All of the characters begin the...

Christine Beckett is faced with some home truths when her best friend, suffering from dementia, decides after a lifetime to be honest with her; Olivia Fletcher has an epiphany at a vaccination centre about a man who has loved her for decades; Bernard Travers revisits an unlikely romantic interlude with the mother of his teenage pen pal that has sustained him for 40 years.Twenty-Twenty Vision is a collection of interlinked short stories about hindsight and late middle-age regret sub...

Berlin 1920. A young woman throws herself from a bridge into the Landwehr Canal, intent on suicide. But she is saved. She refuses to give any clue to her identity. She is literally a nobody. After two years of silence, she claims to be Anastasia, the fourth daughter of the Tsar of Russia. For over sixty years she lives with the firm conviction that she is, indeed, a grand duchess. It is only after her death in 1984 that DNA tests establish that the woman could not have been a Romanov. Who,...

On their arrival in Trieste in 1904, James Joyce left Norah Barnacle outside a railway station while he went to scare up money. He got embroiled in a fight with a couple of sailors and was locked up for his troubles. A penniless Norah was left alone for almost an entire day and night sitting on their suitcases at the station in a city where she knew no one and where she didn't speak the language. In real life, Norah waited for him. This novel asks - what if she hadn't? In Penelope Unbound,...

From a piano abandoned on the strife-torn streets of Dublin at Easter 1916, Mary Morrissy spins the reader backwards through the life of enigmatic beauty Bella Casey, sister of the famed playwright Seán O'Casey. The real and imagined are entwined in a haunting and deeply affecting novel of sexual secrets, obsession and desires. Content warning: Contains some violence and/or strong language.

New fiction by:Suad AldarraCaleb Azumah NelsonJan CarsonElaine FeeneyOona FrawleySinéad GleesonAnna Jean HughesCaleb KlacesNaomi KrügerHenrietta McKerveyPaul McVeighMary Morrissy