'The scent of God...the air was impregnated with him and his mint-sweet and moth-ball evangelists. Just as it was with herring, as you might expect in a fossilised fishing-village on Scotland's repressed east coast where fishing was an act of faith and not yet a computer-science industry designed to suck the last drops of life out of the sea.' A vivid and moving account of the author's upbringing in the 1940s and 1950s in the little fishing village of St Monans. Rush returns decades later ...

Stories and animals have long travelled the same routes. Through our heritage of charming, quirky and profound tales, you will find yourself re-acquainted with Britain's wondrous fauna. Find out how hedgehog ended up with spines and what makes him scuttle so fast, discover how pigs saved a prince from leprosy and why the wealthy lord was so intent on capturing the black fox. Sharon Jacksties' wonderful book combines traditional stories, little-known zoological facts and tr...

Seamus Heaney's new collection elicits continuities and solidarities, between husband and wife, child and parent, then and now, inside an intently remembered present - the stepping stones of the day, the weight and heft of what is passed from hand to hand, lifted and lowered. Human Chain also broaches larger questions of transmission, as lifelines to the inherited past. There are newly minted versions of anonymous early Irish lyrics, poems which stand at the crossroads of oral and...

'A book of innocence and bawdiness, fury and joy...needs to be read and re-read' The TimesOn the banks of the Thames a baby is found floating. Rescued by the Dog-Woman, a giant strong enough to fling an elephant into the air, their lives together will take them on a dizzying journey through space and time.As past and present collapse and centuries overlap, love, sex, truth, lies and twelve dancing princesses take centre stage.'Entra...

'As a child I would sit on the stone wall as if hypnotised, imagining that the world ended where the moutains and the sky met and wishing I could stand at the top and touch the heavens.' This enchanting story tells of a young girl's magical childhood on a farm in the west of Ireland during the 1930s and 1940s. It looks at the mountain-village community, one that was poor, though never short of the necessities of life.

'Evocatively written and charming' - Countryfile'The January Man is a book that makes you want to pull on your boots, grab a map and get out there' - Country LifeThe January Man is the story of a year of walks that was inspired by a song, Dave Goulder's 'The January Man'. Month by month, season by season and region by region, Christopher Somerville walks the British Isles, following routes that con...

This volume is a much-needed new selection of Seamus Heaney's work, taking account of recent volumes and of the author's work as a translator, and offering a more generous choice from previous volumes. Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996 comes as close to being a 'Collected Poems' as its author cares to make it. It replaces his New Selected Poems 1966-1987, giving a fuller selection from each of the volumes represented there and adding large parts of those that...

This superb account of life on the Great Blasket Island off the west coast of Kerry, written as the nineteenth century draws to its close and the dawn of a new era trespasses on the lives of its small community, is both a shocking and captivating read. Here is the first complete translation of Tomás O'Crohan's autobiography An tOileánach, first published in 1929. This edition is based on Professor Sean O Coileain's definitive 2002 Irish language edition. It contains many passages omitted f...

This collection of Norman MacCaig's poems is offered as the definitive edition of his work. It has been edited by his son, Ewen. A prolific writer, MacCaig left about 600 unpublished poems after his death; 99 have been selected for inclusion here. The aim of the selection process was to sustain the overall quality of the 1990 Collected Poems, which was compiled by the poet. Unusually, MacCaig's creativity did not decline with age, and most of the unpublished poems date from his seventies a...

At the centre of this collection, which includes groups of elegies and love poems, there is a short sonnet sequence which concentrates themes apparent elsewhere in the book: the individual's responsibility for his own choices, the artist's commitment to his vocation, the vulnerability of all in the face of circumstance and death.'Throughout the volume Heaney's outstanding gifts, his eye, his ear, his understanding of the poetic language are on display - this is a book we cannot do ...

The title poem of this collection, set on an Irish island, tells of a pilgrim on an inner journey that leads him back into the world that formed him, and then forward to face the crises of the present. Writing in The Washington Post Book World, Hugh Kenner called the narrative sequence in Seamus Heaney's Station Island "as fine a long poem as we've had in fifty years."

'Seamus Heaney has gone beyond the themes of his earlier poetry and has made the giant step towards the most ambitious, most intractable themes of maturity. The power of this book comes from a sense that he is reaching out towards a type of desolation and of isolation without which no imagination can be seen to have grown up.' Eavan Boland, Irish Times'Keyed and pitched unlike any other significant poet at work in the language anywhere.' Harold Bloom, Times Literary Su...