The Irish Book Club

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Storytelling is one of Ireland’s oldest and grandest traditions, and these vivid tales of far-off days will introduce young readers to the country’s irresistible folklore.

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In a small town in 1960s Ireland, a teenage boy is killed in a dreadful accident. His sister, his mother, and a man who is a neighbor, each recalling her or his own life as permanently marked by the absolutely senseless death of the lad, paint in painful but hopeful brushstrokes their versions of the intertwining of love and loss and how the former makes the later endurable.

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Ireland, 1959: Young Christopher Hurley is a tinker, a Pavee gypsy, who roams with his father and extended family from town to town, carrying all their worldly possessions in their wagons. Christy carries with him a burden of guilt as well, haunted by the story of his mother's death in childbirth.

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What could the occupants of 66 Star Street have in common that would attract the undivided attention of a sharp-witted and intuitive otherworldly spirit?

On the ground floor are newlyweds Maeve and Matt, struggling to overcome a traumatic incident that has threatened their storybook romance, while two flights up lives Katie, a hard-working PR manager for a struggling music label. A refreshing update on Brigit Jones, she just turned 40 and, although her social calender is booked solid, and she's snagged an impressive, wealthy man, she questions her life's purpose.

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St. Patrick is perhaps the most venerated saint of the modern age, whose feast day is marked each year by massive celebrations across the world, from Dublin to New York and Sydney to Rio de Janeiro.

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The most spectacular bust of the global financial crisis was not the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers or the near-collapse of AIG but the demise of the entire economy of Ireland. Ship of Fools, a gripping financial morality tale, is both an illuminating analysis of the habits of the last decade and a warning for all time.

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The truth is, the full story of sex and society in 20th-century Ireland has never been told.

In Occasions of Sin, acclaimed historian Diarmaid Ferriter provides for the first time a complete account of the public and private worlds of Irish sex, covering: abortion, gregnancy, celibacy, contraception, censorship, infanticide, homosexuality, prostitution, marriage, popular culture, and more.

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New Collected Poems features the first nine volumes of poetry by Eavon Boland, one of he foremost contempory poets in the English language.

Boland emerged in the 1960s as a powerful new poetic voice in Ireland. Her poems challenged the male-dominated Irish canon, while at the same time situating her within the rich Irish poetic tradition.

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The fourth book in Abrams' successful series that includes Saints, Angels and Myths, tells the story of one of the most popular religious figures in the world--the Virgin Mary.

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 Maguire's Inheritance is the first volume in an epic saga being told by Irish historian RM Fitzpatrick. Following seven generations of the Maguire family, the series will cover one family perspective from the Irish Diaspora at the battle of the Boyne, through the famine, to the misery of Irland in the nineteen thirties.

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When Mitchell is released from prison after serving three years for a vicious attack he doesn't remember, Billy Norton is there to pick him up. But Norton works for Tommy Logan, a ruthless loan shark lowlife with plans Mitchell wants nothing to do with.

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It's the early 1900s in New York and illusionists are the rage. Irish immigrant and PI Molly Murphy and her husband-to-be Police Captain Daniel Sullivan have gone to the theaters to see a few of them.

The most sensational of them all, Harry Houdini, has returned from entertaining European kings and queens, czars and emperors for a brief run on Broadway. But Houdini can't even take the stage when, to the crowd's shock, the opening act goes horribly wrong and an illusionist saws into his assistant.

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In 1790, Lavinia, a seven-year-old Irish orphan with no memory of her past, arrives on a tobacco plantation where she is put to work as an indentured servant with the kitchen house slaves.

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 Over the last thirty years Thomas Kennedy has quietly established a reputation as a novelist of rare grace and vision. Yet American readers and critics may not know his name for the simple reason his fiction has largely been unavailable in America.

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For many of us, the idea of walking away from our jobs and running a charming B&B in the Irish countryside sounds fabulous. Not so for Lainey Byrne, an events manager in Melbourne who gets a real kick out of controlling the chaos of her professional and personal life ( in other words, telling everyone what to do).

But when Lainey's Aunt May passes away, someone from the Byrne family must return home to Ireland and take over her business for a year in order to collect the inheritance. As uusual, Lainey volunteers, deciding to break up with her sex, sensitive boyfriend "for practical reasons." After all, their work keeps them apart even in Melbourne. How would the relationship survive a year of separation?

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The heart-stomping follow-up to Brian McGilloway's acclaimed debut, Gallows Lane continues the compelling series in that captures modern Ireland and showcases a striking new voice in crime writing.

Taking its title from the name of the road down which condemned Donegal criminals were onced led, Gallows Lane once again follows Inspector Benedick Devlin as he investigates a series of murders in the Irish borderlands.

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As children, Eliza Blacknall and William Denton ran wild over the fields of southern Ireland in youthful mischief; they swore they would be friends forever but then fate took Will away to England, while Eliza stayed behind to become a proper Irish countess.

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Close the Floor brings together a distinguished and diverse cast of dance ethnographers, dancers, teachers, choreographers, and dance historians to discuss and reflect on a variety of topics in the world of Irish step dance and related percussive dance forms.

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There is a widespread disillusionment among Christians today. As so many teachings and practices seem irrelevant to the deepest yearnings of the human soul, how do we reconcile our institutional religious traditions with our human neature to embrace a deeper spirituality?

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Heather Terrell's engaging and provocative new novel Brigid of Kildare tells the absorbing story of Saint Brigid and the discovery of the oldest illuminated manuscript in the annals of the Church-- a manuscript that conatins an astonishing secret history.

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When a controversial American senator is attacked during the opening of a Donegal gold mine, Garda Inspector Benedict Devlin is blamed for a lapse in security. The shooting of an illegal immigrant in Belfast the same day leads Devlin to a vicious people-smuggling ring operating in the city. Then Leon Bradley, the young environmentalist who attacked the senator, is found murdered near the site of the mine.

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A long-awaited and much anticipated colletion of nearly 800 poems from more than fifty of the most intriguing and important Irish poets writing since World War II, Wes Davis's An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry is the most comprehensive work of its kind.

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Father Christmas, with his Irish eyes twinkling, ushers in his seven elves and thus begins the Irish tale told and illustrated in this fun coloring book.

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In A Town In-Between, Judith Ridner reveals the influential, turbulent past of a modest, quiet American community. Today Carlisle, Pennsylvania, nestled in the Susquehanna Valley, is far from the nation's political and financial centers. In the eighteenth century; however, Carlisle and its residents stood not only at a geographical crossroads but also at the fulcrum of early American controversies.