In post-war Derry, a young boy grows up in a house heavy with silence.From the 1940s through the early years of the Troubles, Reading in the Dark follows a child who senses that something terrible has happened long before he understands what it is. In whispered arguments, unfinished stories and the grief that grips his mother, he begins to glimpse the truth about his uncle’s death and the betrayal that shaped his family.While poverty, sectarian fea...

Seamus Deane was one of the most vital and versatile authors of our time. Small World presents an unmatched survey of Irish writing, and of writing about Irish issues, from 1798 to the present day. Elegant, polemical, and incisive, it addresses the political, aesthetic, and cultural dimensions of several notable literary and historical moments, and monuments, from the island's past and present. The style of Swift; the continuing influence of Edmund Burke's political thought in the USA; the...

"I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning."James Joyce's supremely innovative fictional autobiography is also, in the apt phrase of the biographer Richard Ellmann, nothing less than "the gestation of a soul." For as he desc...

A daring work of experimental, Modernist genius, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake is one of the greatest literary achievements of the twentieth century, and the crowning glory of Joyce's life. The Penguin Modern Classics edition of includes an introduction by Seamus Deane'riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs'Joyce's final work, Finnegan's Wake is hi...

In 1798, Irish patriots, committed to freeing their country from England, landed with a company of French troops in County Mayo, in westernmost Ireland. They were supposed to be an advance guard, followed by other French ships with the leader of the rebellion, Wolfe Tone. Briefly they triumphed, raising hopes among the impoverished local peasantry and gathering a group of supporters. But before long the insurgency collapsed in the face of a brutal English counterattack.Very few boo...

A gypsy king dies, and a group of villagers seek to save him from the dishonour of a pauper's grave. The dispute over the inheritance of a well-field becomes a struggle between the 'old stock' and the 'new people' for the very ownership of their town. A terrier pup reveals the truth of the relationship between a poacher and gamekeeper. A seasoned drinker subverts the 'dry' policy of a train chartered by a Pioneer pilgrimage. An old man puts on his best suit for this own wake, telling his f...