Lewis Publishing Company
The Irish Bookstore

Contemporary Irish Literature
In this section, we will carry the latest books about Ireland, as well as books by Irish authors.

The Great Shame : And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World by Thomas Keneally.
The Booker Prize-winning Schindler's List (on which Steven Spielberg based his Oscar-winning film) demonstrated that Thomas Keneally could make history as compelling as any novel. His latest book, The Great Shame, expands upon the achievement of his earlier fiction. This is more than just the story of the Keneally family tree, transported from Ireland to Australia in the 19th-century. It is the story of how Irish men and women came to be dispersed all over the world, and what they made of their lives in their new homes. It is the epic history of a whole people.

Cold Steel
Paul Carson. The daughter of an eminent American heart surgeon is found brutally stabbed in a Dublin park. Her father is over to head the Mercy Hospital's new Heart Foundation. The repercussions threaten to be catastrophic: America bays for justice. Then Frank Clancy decides to take a closer look.

Angela's Ashes: A Memoir by Frank McCourt. Born in depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants, Frank McCourt experienced a childhood fraught with poverty and occasional cruelty. When the family moves back to Limerick, Frank endures the most miserable of childhoods. An astonishing, glorious debut, Angela's Ashes recounts McCourt's existence with remarkable exuberance and remarkable forgiveness.

Blood Lines by Liz Ryan. A sweeping saga of Ireland follows two families from the 1960s to the 1990s as Kerry Laraghy, the
daughter of a racehorse trainer, meets Brandon Lawrence,
a wealthy heir longing to escape his life and a doomed marriage.
A first novel.

The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe. The winner of The Irish Times-Aer Lingus Prize and nominated for the Booker Prize, this brilliant story of a killer coming of age reads like "part Huck Finn, part Hannibal Lecter" (New York Times Book Review). Dark, haunting, and hilarious, the book stuns readers with its language and chilling portrait of a macabre and dangerous mind.

Trinity by Leon Uris. "In Ireland there is no future, only the past happening over and over again...." Uris selected the period from the famine of the 1840's to the Easter Rising of 1916 to tell the story of Ireland's past, explain the "troubles" of the present and give insight into her future. This Trinity consists of: The Larkin family of Ballyutogue, generations of Catholic hill farmers in Donegal fighting for survival against the harshness of the land and the injustice of the regime. The Hubbles, representing three centuries of British aristocracy, the mighty Earls of Foyle, who ventured to Ireland to conquer, colonize and exploit. The Macleods of Belfast, a family of devout shipyard workers whose Scottish Presbyterian ancestors were planted in Ulster to secure the Crown's interests. This is the Trinity, the oil and water of the Irish epic that would never mix, of love and hate in a terrible and beautiful drama spanning over half a century.

The Dead School by Patrick McCabe. The acclaimed author of The Butcher Boy, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize, returns to the rich, emotionally dense landscape of small-town Ireland to explore the inner lives of two men, a schoolteacher and Headmaster, each the product of a soul-stifling culture, each battling his own demons of loss and betrayal.

TheDeath of an Irish Sea Wolf A Peter McGarr Mystery by Bartholomew Gill. Fifty years after a foreigner appeared on a remote island off the Irish Coast and began bestowing money and gifts to the townspeople, the island is being ravaged, and Peter McGarr, head of Ireland's Special Crimes Unit, must find out why.

Pope Patrick by Peter De Rosa. By turns funny, tender, exciting, and controversial, this hilarious satire offers a scathingly brilliant, delightfully droll novel of principles, power, and faith. When kindly Irish priest Brian O'Flynn is chosen as the new pope, he turns out to be the holiest, bravest, most likable pontiff since Saint Peter.

Snow in August by Pete Hamill. Brooklyn, 1947: The war veterans have come home, Jackie Robinson is about to become a Dodger, and, in one close-knit working class neighborhood, an 11-year-old Irish Catholic boy has just made friends with a lonely rabbi from Prague. A wonderfully evocative, deeply affecting fable for our times, Snow in August tells the story of this unlikely friendship.

A Drinking Life: A Memoir by Pete Hamill. A celebrated journalist, whose career has included writing for both The New York Post and New York Newsday, provides an unforgettable memoir of what it means to grow up Irish in New York--and a frank look at how alcohol shaped those years. "Energetic, compelling, very funny . . . often brutally candid."--Entertainment Weekly.

Reading in the Dark: A Novel by Seamus Deane. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, this mesmerizing story of childhood set amidst the violence of Northern Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s is breathtakingly sad, but vibrant and unforgettable. Haunted by a truth he both wants and does not want to uncover, the boy narrator of this novel listens and watches as the world of legend surrounding him reveals its transfixing reality, unfolding its secrets like a collection of folktales.

Short Stories:
Pedlar's Revenge

by Liam O'Flaherty

The Collected Stories (Vintage International) by John McGahern. These 34 funny, tragic, bracing, and acerbic stories represent the complete short fiction of one of Ireland's finest living writers. On struggling farms, in Dublin's rain-drenched streets, or in parched exile in Franco's Spain, McGahern's characters wage a confused but touching war against the facts of life.

Evening Class by Maeve Binchy. Maeve Binchy can always be counted on to spin an involving tale about ordinary people that brings out the extraordinary in everyone. In Evening Class, Binchy zooms in on the working-class of Dublin. Schoolteacher Aidan Dunne organizes an evening class in Italian with the help of Nora O'Donoghue, an Irishwoman returning home after 26 years in Sicily. When the somewhat squashed-by-life denizens of the surrounding neighborhood take the
unexpected step of enrolling in the class, they find their lives transformed.

Commitments by Roddy Doyle. There is nothing like a band. There is nothing like a soul band. There really is nothing quite like this Irish soul band. This gritty, heart-warming tale of a group of Dublin kids with a dream and a lot of soul will leave you with a warm feeling for the underdogs who almost made it.

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