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 grip on the public imagination. Trapped in drifting polar pack ice for ten months, Ernest Shackleton and his crew fought for survival against all the odds. When the Endurance was finally crushed...

EIGHTY YEARS AFTER HIS DEATH, the legend of Ernest Shackleton and the extraordinary story of the Endurance South Pole expedition still hold a compelling grip on the public imagination. Trapped in drifting polar pack ice, Ernest Shackleton and his crew fought for survival against all the odds. When the Endurance was finally crushed, they were stranded on ice-floes for more than a year before reaching Elephant Island in April 1916. From there Shackleton and his five men emb...

Julie McDermot has just been released from 'The Mental', the psychiatric institution where her husband committed her after the devastating loss of their two infant children. Returning to her narrow, lonely life along the canal, Julie is haunted by grief and the aching absence of what might have been.As she struggles to piece herself back together, an unexpected encounter with a stranger along the canal offers a glimmer of connection and the fragile possibility of hope. Their encoun...

'I'm not an impulsive person. Twice in my life I've done impulsive things. The first time was when I packed a bag, walked out on my wife and kids, left my job and hit the road to follow the Captain. Goodbye was all she wrote.' These wide-ranging stories follow the disparate disciples of the Captain – a mysterious, powerful and magnetic figure whose violent and chaotic death at the hands of the army radically alters their lives in myriad ways. From rural North American farms and dive bars t...

We Seldom Talk About the Past is John MacKenna's first selected collection of short stories, from a career spanning over three decades. The stories selected come from four collections of short fiction, and represent a culmination of MacKenna's work in a form of writing he has made uniquely his own. Often compared to John McGahern, and Raymond Carver, and deeply influenced by masters of the form like Chekov, MacKenna's stories focus on the quotidian truths of our lives, of the mome...

'I Knew This Place' by John MacKenna is a collection of twenty-eight of his radio essays from RTE's radio programme 'Sunday Miscellany.'John MacKenna is the author of twenty-seven books both fiction and non-fiction. A skilled actor and narrator, he won a Jacob's Radio Award for his documentary about Leonard Cohen. The radio essays in this collection were described by The Irish Times as 'enchantments woven with rich and intimate language, snapshots of lives lived, and days passed, d...