Gallery books

Set in the mysterious landscape of the bogs of rural Ireland, Carr's lyrical and timeless play tells the story of Hester Swane, an Irish traveller with a deep and unearthly connection to her land. Tormented by the memory of a mother who deserted her, Hester is once again betrayed, this time by the father of her child, the man she loves. On the brink of despair, she embarks on a terrible journey of vengeance as the secrets of her tangled history are revealed. Premiered at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in 1998.

Troy has fallen. It's the end of war and the beginning of something else. Something worse. As the cries die down after the final battle, there are reckonings to be made. Humiliated by her defeat and imprisoned by the charismatic victor Agamemnon, the great queen Hecuba must wash the blood of her buried sons from her hands and lead her daughters forward into a world they no longer recognize. Agamemnon has slaughtered his own daughter to win this war. But now another sacrifice is demanded... In a world where human instinct has been ravaged by violence, is everything as it seems in the hearts of the winners and those they have defeated?

When Cora and her younger sister, Mimi, are sent to stay with their great Auntie Ida in an isolated village in 1958, they discover that they are in danger from a centuries-old evil and, along with village boys Roger and Peter, strive to uncover the horrifying truth before it is too late.

"Brian Friel's affinity with the work of certain nineteenth-century Russian writers is manifest in his own fiction and drama and in acclaimed adaptations of works by Chekov and Turgenev." "This marvellously inventive new play is based on a theme in 'The Lady with the Lapdog', a story Chekov wrote in 1899. At an end-of-season resort on the shore of the Black Sea, a pair of strangers play 'the Yalta game': divining the lives of other holiday-makers or investing the lives of others with an imagined life. These companions in adventure seek an end to their loneliness by throwing themselves into the game and by almost convincing each other that 'disappointments are only the postponement of the complete happiness which has to come'." "Brian Friel has unravelled a thread of Chekov's original and woven it afresh into a startling tapestry of deep longings and flawed resolutions."--Jacket.

"JPW King is an English, upper-middle-class 'dynamatologist' -- a quack psychologist -- living in Dublin. Caught between the demands of Mona, his mistress, Helen, the unattainable love of his life and an insatiable taste for vodka, the major question is how to get through the day. Then a client walks in to his office -- an Irish man who wants to sing like Beniamino Gigli."--back cover.

A woman - gaunt and ill, haggard after giving birth eight times - faces death. What was life? What was love? What else could have been? Full of mordant, bitter humour, this is a passionate threnody from one of Ireland's leading playwrights. 'Woman and Scarecrow' premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in June 2006.

"Derek Mahon's rich new collection turns its wide-angled lens on a 'dozy seaside town' in County Cork, four fellow Ulster poets, a bicycle shop in Delhi and the volcanic origins of the Canary Islands, against the background of a 'cascading world economy'. Alive to the current climate, it also revisits Chinese poetry of the T'ang era and explores that of modern India in the work of the fictitious Hindi poet Gopal Singh."--BOOK JACKET.