The Last September

Author	J. Sheridan Le Fanu
ISBN	0192839470

This remarkable collection of stories, first published in 1872, includes Green Tea, The Familiar, Mr. Justice Harbottle, The Room in the Dragon Volant, and Carmilla. The five stories are purported to be cases by Dr. Hesselius, a 'metaphysical' doctor, who is willing to consider the ghosts both as...

Author	Samuel Beckett
ISBN	0802150373

'Murphy', Samuel Beckett's first published novel, was written in English and published in London in 1938; Beckett himself subsequently translated the book into French, and it was published in France in 1947. The novel recounts the hilarious but tragic life of Murphy in London as he attempts to establish...

Author

Flann O'Brien

A wildly comic send-up of Irish literature and culture, At Swim-Two-Birds is the story of a young, lazy, and frequently drunk Irish college student who lives with his curmudgeonly uncle in Dublin. When not in bed (where he seems to spend most of his time) or reading he is composing a mischief-filled novel...

Author	Kate O'Brien
ISBN	1844083160

Mere Marie-Helene once turned her back on life, sealing up her heart in order to devote herself to God. Now the formidable Mother Superior of an Irish convent, she has, for some time, been experiencing grave doubts about her vocation. But when she meets Anna Murphy, the youngest-ever boarder, the little...

Author	Edna O'Brien
ISBN	0452274524

O'Brien builds a puzzle, but once the pieces are all in place, she doesn't offer a solution. To do so would be trite. What she succeeds in doing is make clear the complexity of Ireland by giving her characters the space they need to become known and thus to become sympathetic. Not every single character...

Author	William Morris
ISBN	0192801775

News from Nowhere(1890) is the best-known prose work of William Morris and the only significant English utopia to be written since Thomas More's. The novel describes the encounter between a visitor from the nineteenth century, William Guest, and a decentralized and humane socialist future. Set...

Author	Seamus Deane
ISBN	0375700234

A New York Times Notable Book
Winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize
Winner of the Irish Times Fiction Award and International Award

Hugely acclaimed in Great Britain, where it was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize and short-listed for the Booker, Seamus Deane's first novel is a mesmerizing...

Author

Seamus Heaney

In North Seamus Heaney found a myth which allowed him to articulate a vision of Ireland - its people, history and landscape. Here the Irish experience is refracted through images drawn from different parts of the Northern European experience, and the idea of the north allows the poet to contemplate...

Author	J.M. Synge
ISBN	0140184325

In 1907 J. M. Synge achieved both notoriety and lasting fame with The Playboy of the Western World. The Aran Islands, published in the same year, records his visits to the islands in 1898-1901, when he was gathering the folklore and anecdotes out of which he forged The Playboy and his other major dramas.

Yet...

Author	Elizabeth Taylor
ISBN	1844083225

In the faded coastal village of Newby, everyone looks out for - and in on - each other, and beneath the deceptively sleepy exterior, passions run high. Beautiful divorcee Tory is painfully involved with her neighbour, Robert, while his wife Beth, Tory's best friend, is consumed by the worlds she creates...

Author	Nan Shepherd
ISBN	0862411416

Nan Shepherd is best known for The Living Mountain, her uniquely personal book about The Cairngorms which is rightly regarded as a classic piece of nature writing. This 1928 novel was her first published work.

At its core is a rites of passage novel, told largely in Aberdeenshire dialect - this...

Author

Maria Edgeworth

Set in Ireland prior to its achieving legislative independence from Britain in 1782, Castle Rackrent tells the story of three generations of an estate--owning family as seen through the eyes—and as told in the voice—of their longtime servant, Thady Quirk, recorded and commented on by an anonymous...