Shamrock Tea is an Irish drug that enables its users to see things not given to ordinary mortals. They can sense colours and sounds more vividly; they can penetrate the surface of paintings; they can cross time. The narrator, his cousin and a strange Belgian friend know that their lives are ruled mysteriously by the great van Eyck painting, The Arnolfini Portrait, and they have travelled in dream like moments through the painting into other times. They discover that each moment is connected to every other. But in the strange world of Shamrock Tea, no story can be straightforward. With a cast of characters that includes the gardener Ludwig Wittgenstein, this book will blow your mind.

The Shamrock and Peach is a unique book in many ways. It is a cookbook that explores the best of Ulster-Scots cuisine but is also the tale of an immigrant's journey, following in the footsteps of those Scots-Irish settlers who forged the trails of Appalachia years ago. It is a story of the many cultural overlaps that exist between the North of Ireland and the Deep South, celebrating those cultural expressions through the language of really good food. The first half of the book is set in the green fields of Ireland from where we cross the ocean to the American South to discover some wonderful food experiences that have their roots in the Emerald Isle. Filled with beautiful photographs of both regions, this cookbook will be a fun and interesting resource to browse through and use in your kitchen for years to come.

A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction offers an authoritative overview of contemporary British fiction in its social, political, and economic contexts. Focuses on the fiction that has emerged since the late 1970s, roughly since the start of the Thatcher era. Comprises original essays from major scholars. Topics range from the rise and fall of the postcolonial novel to controversies over the celebrity author. The emphasis is on the whole fiction scene, from bookstores and prizes to the changing economics of film adaptation. Enables students to read contemporary works of British fiction with a much clearer sense of where they fit within British cultural life.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. Ciaran Carson is one of the most challenging and inventive of contemporary Irish writers, exhibiting verbal brilliance, formal complexity, and intellectual daring across a remarkably varied body of work. This study considers the full range of his oeuvre, in poetry, prose, and translations, and discusses the major themes to which he returns, including: memory and history, narrative, language and translation, mapping, violence, and power. It argues that the singularity of Carson’s writing is to be found in his radical imaginative engagements with ideas of space and place. The city of Belfast, in particular, occupies a crucially important place in his texts, serving as an imaginative focal point around which his many other concerns are constellated. The city, in all its volatile mutability, is an abiding frame of reference and a reservoir of creative impetus for Carson’s imagination. Accordingly, the book adopts an interdisciplinary approach that draws upon geography, urbanism, and cultural theory as well as literary criticism. It provides both a stimulating and thorough introduction to Carson’s work, and a flexible critical framework for exploring literary representations of space.