Read Ireland Book News - Issue 16
<-- [Back To Main Menu] 1. Beyond Belief: A Mind-Blowing Pilgrimage Through Religious Ireland by Liam Fay (paperback 9.99 Irish pounds / 15.00 US Dollars approximately) [Add To Basket]
There are parts of the world where religion is a contentious, fraught, grave business which ruptures families, rends nations, and causes fellow human beings to kill one another. In the island of saints and scholars, however, it's a lot more serious than that. Here, it is not God but His followers who move in mysterious ways.
Journalist Liam Fay has won a national journalism award for his investigation into the wild side of faith in Ireland and the weird and wonderful characters whose motley creeds range from the merely bizarre to the pigstick nutty.
Part travelogue, part lampoon, part journey into the heart of darkness, this book also offers Fay's acerbic eye-witness accounts of some of the remarkable vigils, pilgrimages and retreats on the traditional Irish religious character.
Uproarious, revealing, thought-provoking and laugh-out-loud funny, this book is an unforgettable exploration of a people and their faiths in the late 20th century Ireland.
2. Fallen Idol: Haughey's Controversial Career by T. Ryle Dwyer (paperback; 7.99 IRP / 12.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
Charles Haughey and controversy have always been synonymous. He has been involved in major political scandals of Watergate proportions in four different decades: in the 1096s and 70s as a Fianna Fail minister, in the 1980s as Taoiseach. When Sean Doherty finally blew the whistle on the 'Liffeygate' scandal - the earlier tapping of the telephones of political journalists - and Haughey fell from power in 1992, one of his long-standing critics in his own party said: "It is going to be a damned boring scene with Charlie to kick around.' Never was a political prophecy more inaccurate, for it was the events of 1997 - and particularly the Payments to Politician tribunal - that finally toppled Charles Haughey. Fired by his prodigious self-belief, reassured by his ability to literally rise from the dead in political terms, Haughey had managed to retain the aura of a god-like national leader despite all the controversies, speculation, doubts and mysteries. The confirmation of massive payments made by businessman Ben Dunne to Charles Haughey changed all that.
This book is the story of Haughey's controversial career from the 1960s to date. Lively, succinct, opinionated, drawing extensively on personal recollection, it is the indispensable Haughey handbook.
3a. Collected Fiction of Neil Jordan (pb; 7.99 IRP / 12 USD) [Add To Basket]
Neil Jordan, the director of the Crying Game, Interview with the Vampire and Michael Collins, is also the author of highly-acclaimed fiction, collected here in this omnibus edition. These are remarkable novels, poignant and beautifully controlled, inspired and surrealistic. Includes Night in Tunisia, The Past and The Dream of a Beast.
3b. Sunrise with Sea Monster by Neil Jordan (hc; Special Offer 4.99 IRP / 7.50 USD - original Irish price 9.99) [Add To Basket]
This moving and magical novel explores the hopeless inability of two men- father and son - to express their feelings for one another, until the father is literally beyond language. Set during the wartime politics of the beginning of the Irish Free State, the novel weaves together love and politics, sex and treachery. It is a haunting and beautiful novel.
4. Psalm Killer by Chris Petit (pb; 6.50 IRP / 9.75 USD) [Add To Basket]
In 1985 a killer stalks the streets of Belfast, Northern Ireland. Detective Inspector Cross's quarry might simply be someone who has made sectarian violence his vocation, except this killer cuts across political and religious boundaries. The investigation draws in a young policewoman, and to unmask the killer she and Cross must enter a maze of conspiracy, paranoia and tainting secrecy. At its centre lurks a violence beyond their worst imaginings - a nightmare world with exit, where political and sexual terror from part of the same deadly trap. Then, as they uncover the motives and layered identity of the killer, the evil closes in ... a disturbing, lurid and highly impressive first novel.
5a. Irish Family Names Map (4.50 IRP / 6.75 USD) [Add To Basket]
This colourful pictorial map illustrated the medieval coats of arms of Ireland's principal families, and shows the location of their lands from the 14th century to the 17th century, following the Anglo-Norman invasion.
5b. A Genealogical and Historical Map of Ireland (4.99 IRP / 7.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
This map shows the distribution and location of Irish family names barony by barony. As their names frequently imply, the baronies - over 300 of them - represent divisions of great antiquity based on the great Gaelic Clan or family holdings.
Included in the map are many topographical features both ancient and modern, notably the five historic provinces of Ireland. Also, an index is appended to facilitate reference.
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