‘A cracker’ Patrick McCabe ‘An irresistible comedy’ Luke Kennard Laura Cassidy is going all the way. Hollywood. Starry lights. The Walk of Fame. It’s her destiny. At least, that’s what her movie-obsessed father used to tell her. That was always the plan. Sure, it’s been a bit slow-going, but the stars have finally aligned. The long-awaited new theatre is about to open, and their first production calls for a particularly fiery female lead. This part has Laura’s name on it. There’s her meddlesome older sister to get past – freshly returned from saving the world. Her occasional lover and stand-in leading man seems to think it’s all a waste of time. And probably best not to mention the audition to her mother, especially after what happened last time . . . Laura just has to stay one step ahead of them all. Channelling the era of Hollywood’s silver screen and told in a voice that blends devil humour, quiet mayhem, and a singled-minded optimism that might just lead to disaster, Laura Cassidy’s Walk of Fame tells the story of a troubled soul desperate to find her place in life.

Laura Cassidy is going all the way. Hollywood. Starry lights. The Walk of Fame. It’s her destiny. At least, that’s what her movie-obsessed father used to tell her. That was always the plan. Sure, it’s been a bit slow-going, but the stars have finally aligned. The long-awaited new theatre is about to open, and their first production calls for a particularly fiery female lead. This part has Laura’s name on it. There’s her meddlesome older sister to get past – freshly returned from saving the world. Her occasional lover and stand-in leading man seems to think it’s all a waste of time. And probably best not to mention the audition to her mother, especially after what happened last time . . . Laura just has to stay one step ahead of them all. Channelling the era of Hollywood’s silver screen and told in a voice that blends devil humour, quiet mayhem, and a singled-minded optimism that might just lead to disaster, Laura Cassidy’s Walk of Fame tells the story of a troubled soul desperate to find her place in life.

Shortlisted for The Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards 2017 Longlisted for the 2017 Desmond Elliott Prize 'Alan McMonagle possesses a style that is all his own and I found his first novel compelling from start to finish. Read it.' Patrick McCabe, author of The Butcher Boy Ithaca, the ferociously funny and unbelievably poignant debut novel from Alan McMonagle, combines a fiercely emotional story with crackling prose. Summer 2009, and eleven-year-old Jason Lowry is preoccupied with thoughts of the Da he has never known. In the meantime, his vodka-swilling, swings-from-the-hip Ma is busy entertaining her latest boyfriend and indulging her fondness for joyriding. Jason escapes to the Swamp: a mysteriously rising pool of fetid water on the outskirts of the town. There, he meets the girl, a being as lost as himself. Together, they conjure exotic adventures - from ancient Egypt to the search for Ithaca, home of Odysseus. But what begin as innocent flights of fancy soon become forays into hazardous territory; the girl is a dangerous (and very committed) partner in crime.

'Exceptional' The Times 'Luminous . . . Unexpected' Guardian Shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, the Dalkey Literary Awards and the Kerry Group Awards Luke O’Brien has left Dublin to live a quiet life on the bend of the River Sullane. Alone in his big house, he longs for a return to his family’s heyday and turns to books for solace. One morning a young woman arrives at his door, presenting Luke and his family with an almost impossible dilemma.

From the bard of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac's Maggie Cassidy is a profoundly moving, autobiographical novel of adolescence and first love One of the dozen books written by Jack Kerouac in the early and mid-1950s, Maggie Cassidy was not published until 1959, after the appearance of On the Road had made its author famous overnight. Long out of print, this touching novel of adolescent love in a New England mill town, with its straight-forward narrative structure, is one of Kerouac's most accesible works. It is a remarkable, bittersweet evocation of the awkwardness and the joy of growing up in America.

A vibrant, intimate, hypnotic portrait of one woman's life, from an important new writer Tess Lohan is the kind of woman that we meet and fail to notice every day. A single mother. A nurse. A quiet woman, who nonetheless feels things acutely—a woman with tumultuous emotions and few people to share them with. Academy Street is Mary Costello's luminous portrait of a whole life. It follows Tess from her girlhood in western Ireland through her relocation to America and her life there, concluding with a moving reencounter with her Irish family after forty years of exile. The novel has a hypnotic pull and a steadily mounting emotional force. It speaks of disappointments but also of great joy. It shows how the signal events of the last half century affect the course of a life lived in New York City. Anne Enright has said that Costello's first collection of stories, The China Factory, "has the feel of work that refused to be abandoned; of stories that were written for the sake of getting something important right . . . Her writing has the kind of urgency that the great problems demand" (The Guardian). Academy Street is driven by this same urgency. In sentence after sentence it captures the rhythm and intensity of inner life.

Even though the Irish child sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church have appeared steadily in the media, many children remain in peril. In The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature, Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus examine modern cultural responses to child sex abuse in Ireland. Using descriptions of these scandals found in newspapers, historiographical analysis, and 20th- and 21st-century literature, Valente and Backus expose a public sphere ardently committed to Irish children's souls and piously oblivious to their physical welfare. They offer historically contextualized and psychoanalytically informed readings of scandal narratives by nine notable modern Irish authors who actively, pointedly, and persistently question Ireland's responsibilities regarding its children. Through close, critical readings, a more nuanced and troubling account emerges of how Ireland's postcolonial heritage has served to enable such abuse. The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature refines the debates on why so many Irish children were lost by offering insight into the lived experience of both the children and those who failed them.