Hot off the press...

Want to get into gardening? Wondering how to get started? Anxious that you won’t know what to do? Have given up before, want to get started again? Want to improve your growing, yields and practices? This is the book for you.

It takes you through all the most commonly grown vegetables and fruits in the context of Irish conditions. Learn from a gardener who has worked a garden since the 1940s as a child on his father’s market garden, then as an adult home gardener and horticulturist, currently as an allotment advisor.

This book combines the old and most recent knowledge in one easy-to-follow text. It’s a book you’ll consult over and over, through the wayward Irish seasons.

The Spirit Level,
Kate Pickett & Richard Wilkinson

Why do we mistrust people more in the UK than in Japan? Why do Americans have higher rates of teenage pregnancy than the French? What makes the Swedish thinner than the Greeks? The answer: inequality.

This groundbreaking book, based on years of research, provides hard evidence to show:

- How almost everything - from life expectancy to depression levels, violence to illiteracy - is affected not by how wealthy a society is, but how equal it is

- That societies with a bigger gap between rich and poor are bad for everyone in them - including the well-off

- How we can find positive solutions and move towards a happier, fairer future

Urgent, provocative and genuinely uplifting, The Spirit Level has been heralded as providing a new way of thinking about ourselves and our communities, and could change the way you see the world.

In this dramatic first-person narrative, Greg Mortenson picks up where Three Cups of Tea left off in 2003, recounting his relentless, ongoing efforts to establish schools for girls in Afghanistan; his extensive work in Azad Kashmir and Pakistan after a massive earthquake hit the region in 2005; and the unique ways he has built relationships with Islamic clerics, militia commanders, and tribal leaders even as he was dodging shootouts with feuding Afghan warlords and surviving an eight-day armed abduction by the Taliban.

He shares for the first time his broader vision to promote peace through education and literacy, as well as touching on military matters, Islam, and women - all woven together with the many rich personal stories of the people who have been involved in this remarkable two-decade humanitarian effort.

7 April 1926: on the steps of the Capitol in Rome, surrounded by chanting Fascists, the Honourable Violet Gibson raises her revolver and fires at the Italian head of state, the poster-boy of the European Right and darling of the British ruling class. The bullet narrowly misses the dictator’s bald head, hitting him in the nose. Of all his would-be assassins, she came closest to changing the course of history.
What had brought her to this moment? She was the daughter of an important Anglo-Irish peer, born to privilege and ease. Her family was Protestant, Unionist and conservative. She should have married into the aristocracy and lived the life that women of her milieu were expected to lead.

Yet terrible unhappiness lurked beneath that glittering surface. She was a serious-minded young woman in an age when girls were meant to think as little as possible and to avoid intellectual or political excitement. Her spiritual quest brought her to a kind of left-wing Catholicism and to sympathy for Irish nationalism, to the horror of her family who exacted a severe emotional cost from her for her rebellion. And she fell in love with Italy, and watched as Mussolini’s thugs took it into the moral cesspit of Fascism. She felt she had to act.

But Violet Gibson, unlike Hitler’s attempted assassins, never received the smallest recognition for her gesture. She was merely a ‘mad woman’, or judged to be so by a world that then thought Mussolini perfectly sane. She was confined to a lunatic asylum after a ten-minute interview with a society doctor, condemned without trial to a whole-life sentence without parole. She died in 1956. Her letters to friends languished unsent, and she never had a chance of being released, even after Mussolini declared war on Britain.

Frances Stonor Saunders’ unforgettable and compulsively readable book rescues this gentle, driven woman from a silent void and restores her dignity and purpose.

When a thousand Muslim protestors paraded through a British town with a copy of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses before ceremoniously burning the book, it was an act motivated by anger and offence as well as one calculated to shock and offend. It did more than that: the image of the burning book became an icon of the Muslim anger. Sent around the globe by photographers and TV cameras, the image announced a new world. Twenty years later, the questions raised by the Rushdie affair – Islam’s relationship to the West, the meaning of multiculturalism, the limits of tolerance in a liberal society – have become some of the defining issues of our time.

Taking the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa as his starting point, Kenan Malik examines how radical Islam has gained hold in Muslim communities, how multiculturalism contributed to this, and how the Rushdie affair transformed the very nature of the debate on tolerance and free speech.

Malik’s important contribution to the current discourse is informative, fresh and very readable ~ Rory Tevlin, The Irish Times review

While speaking at a memorial event for her father, Siri Hustvedt suffered a violent seizure from the neck down. She managed to finish her talk and the paroxysms stopped, but not for good. Again and again she found herself a victim of the shudders. What had happened?

Chronicling her search for the shaking woman, Hustvedt takes the reader on a journey into contemporary psychiatry, neurology and psychoanalysis. She unearths stories and theories from the annals of medical history, literature and philosophy, and delves into her own past. In the process, she raises fundamental questions: what is the relationship between mind and body? How do we remember? What is the self?

In a seamless synthesis of personal experience and extensive research, Hustvedt conveys the often frightening mysteries of illness and the complexities of diagnosis. As engaging as it is thought-provoking, The Shaking Woman brilliantly illuminates the age-old dilemma of the mental and the physical, and what it means to be human.

Tim Farnsworth is a handsome, healthy man, ageing with the grace of a matinée idol. He loves his work. He loves his family. He loves his kitchen. And then one day he stands up and walks out on all of it. He cannot stop walking. And, as his body propels him relentlessly forward, deep into the unfamiliar outer reaches of the city, he begins to realise he is moving further and further from his old self, seemingly unable to turn back and retrieve what he has lost.

In his extraordinary novel Joshua Ferris delineates with great tenderness and a rare and inimitable wit the devastating story of a life taken for granted and what happens when that life is torn away without explanation or warning. The Unnamed is no less than a shimmering reflection of our times, of the lives we aspire to and the terrifying realisation of what is beyond our control.

In Ferris's remarkable second novel, a life of privilege comes to ruin as a result of a strange and mysterious illness. Attorney Tim Farnsworth thought he had recovered from a disorder that compels him to walk to the point of exhaustion. But now his walking disease has returned and shows no sign of going into remission. His wife, Jane, supportive beyond measure, does everything she can to keep Tim safe during his walks, including making routine midnight trips to pick him up. As the disorder takes increasing control over their lives, however, the sacrifices they make for each other drive them further apart.

Ferris manages to inject a bizarre whimsy into a devastatingly sad story, with each of Tim's outings revealing a new aspect of his marriage. The novel's circular aspects, with would-be happy endings spiraling back into chaos and then descending further, integrate Ferris's themes of family, sickness, and the uncertain division between body and mind into a vastly satisfying and original book. ~ Publishers Weekly

Ignatius Perrish spent the night drunk and doing terrible things. He woke up the next morning with one hell of a hangover, a raging headache . . . and a pair of horns growing from his temples.

Once, Ig lived the life of the blessed: born into privilege, the second son of a renowned American musician, and the younger brother of a rising late-night TV star, Ig had security and wealth and a place in his community. Ig had it all, and more - he had the love of Merrin Williams, a love founded on shared daydreams, mutual daring, and unlikely midsummer magic.

Then beautiful, vivacious Merrin was gone - raped and murdered, under inexplicable circumstances - with Ig the only suspect. He was never tried for the crime, but in the court of public opinion, Ig was and always would be guilty.

Now Ig is possessed with a terrible new power to go with his terrible new look, and he means to use it to find the man who killed Merrin and destroyed his life. Being good and praying for the best got him nowhere. It's time for a little revenge; it's time the devil had his due.

Released in Ireland/U.K. March 16th

Young Nour is a North African desert tribesman. It is 1909, and as the First World War looms Nour’s tribe – the Blue Men – are forced from their lands by French colonial invaders. Spurred on by thirst, hunger, suffering, they seek guidance from a great spiritual leader. The holy man sends them even further from home, on an epic journey northward, in the hope of finding a land in which they can again be free.

Decades later, an orphaned descendant of the Blue Men – a girl called Lalla – is living in a shantytown on the coast of Morocco. Lalla has inherited both the pride and the resilience of her tribe – and she will need them, as she makes a bid to escape her forced marriage to a wealthy older man. She flees to Marseilles, where she experiences both the hardships of immigrant life – as a hotel maid – and the material prosperity of those who succeed – when she becomes a successful model. And yet Lalla does not betray the legacy of her ancestors.

In these two narratives set in counterpoint, Nobel Prize-winning novelist J. M. G. Le Clézio tells – powerfully and movingly – the story of the ‘last free men’ and of Europe’s colonial legacy – a story of war and exile and of the endurance of the human spirit.

a book one must admire for its profound seriousness, for its scorched-earth poetics and for its rendering of a lost world ~ Douglas Kennedy, The Times review

"There," says Alice Hayward to Reverend Stephen Drew, just after her baptism. Twelve hours later, she suffers a violent death at the hands of her husband who will kills shoots himself. But when the medical examiner autopsies the two bodies, what appeared to be a straightforward case of domestic abuse, turns out to be far more complex. Given the angle of the bullet and the amount of blood spattered around the room, he can only conclude that someone other than George Hayward fired the gun.

Told through the eyes of four narrators, Secrets Of Eden is full of twists and turns, making you question the innocence of each character. Stephen Drew goes first and wins our trust as he draws us into his world, describing his shock at the violence that hit this small, sleepy town, and his sudden loss of faith which ultimately will make him flee. But Catherine Benincasa, the tough State Attorney, has her suspicions about Drew.

Following is Heather Laurent, whose appearance in the town on the day after the killings is curious in itself; she is a bestselling author of national fame, far removed from this local community. And yet she herself lost her parents in similar circumstances and easily identifies with Alice's 15-year-old daughter, Katie, who was safely at a rock concert with her best friend the evening her parents died, well away from the killer's reach...

In a room above a bizarre German museum, and far from the prying eyes of strangers, lives the Old Man. Caretaker of the museum by day, by night he enjoys the sound of silence, broken by the occasional crunch of a spider between his blackened teeth. Little Hands Clapping brings together the Old Man with the respectable Doctor Ernst Frohlicher, his greedy dog Hans and a cast of grotesque and hilarious townsfolk, all of whose lives are thrown together as the town uncovers a crime so outrageous that it will shock the world. From its sinister opening to its explosive denouement, Little Hands Clapping blends lavishly entertaining storytelling with Rhodes's macabre imagination, entrancing originality and magical touch.

Ruprecht Van Doren is an overweight genius whose hobbies include very difficult maths and the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Daniel 'Skippy' Juster is his roommate. In the grand old Dublin institution that is Seabrook College for Boys, nobody pays either of them much attention. But when Skippy falls for Lori, the Frisbee-playing Siren from the girls' school next door, suddenly all kinds of people take an interest - including Carl, part-time drug-dealer and official school psychopath.

While his teachers battle over modernisation, and Ruprecht attempts to open a portal into a parallel universe, Skippy, in the name of love, is heading for a showdown - in the form of a fatal doughnut-eating race that only one person will survive. This unlikely tragedy will explode Seabrook's century-old complacency and bring all kinds of secrets into the light, until teachers and pupils alike discover that the fragile lines dividing past from present, love from betrayal - and even life from death - have become almost impossible to read…