Irish Biography & Memoir Books

Martin O'Neill has had one of the most incredible careers in football - winning European Cups, captaining his country at a world cup, and decades as a hugely successful manager. On Days Like These tells his fascinating story in hi…

This is the gripping inside story of Ireland's bankrupt billionaire, Sean Quinn, who went from rags to riches before gambling it all on Anglo-Irish Bank shares and became the world's biggest personal loser of the economic collapse…

The hilarious memoir from the funniest man in football!Roddy Collins is a football man - now in the sixth decade of a career as a player (at sixteen clubs), manager (twelve clubs) and commentator. And he is a funny man: an unequal…

From the author of Mrs Engels and The Sisters Mao, an intimate family memoir about filial love and its limits, separation, and loss. Gavin is spending the quarantine with his eighty-year-old mother, whose mind is slowly slipping a…

Tom Crean is one of the most iconic figures in Irish history. Born in 1877 in County Kerry, he enlisted in the Royal Navy at the age of sixteen, the start of a career that would bring him to the most extreme environments on Earth.…

A poignant and introspective memoir from Irish journalist and broadcaster Charlie Bird. In 2021, Charlie Bird was diagnosed with motor neurone disease - a man whose voice was so synonymous with his career faced losing it completel…

Memoirs can be boring, covering the same old ground, telling essentially the same old stories. Not this one. Herbie Brennan began a lifelong career as a writer at the age of 18. He worked as a journalist, a magazine editor, an adv…

Set around a small family farm on the edge of a bog, a few miles from the river Shannon, Minor Monuments is a collection of essays unfolding from the landscape of the Irish midlands. Taking in the physical and philo- sophical powe…

Claire Walsh spent her twenties living the life she thought she was supposed to live, all the while playing hide and seek with depression. As a result, the road to recovery was the only travelling she did. Aged 32, single and livi…

Every day a beloved father dies. Every day a lover departs. Every day a woman turns forty.All three happening together brings a moment of reckoning. Medieval historian Elizabeth Boyle made sense of these events the best way she k…

Death is a whisper in the Anglo-Saxon world. But on a remote island, off the coast of County Mayo, it has a louder voice. The local radio station runs a thrice-daily roll-call of the recently departed.The islanders keep vigil with…

Seamas O'Reilly's mother died when he was five, leaving him, his ten brothers and sisters and their beloved father in their sprawling bungalow in rural Derry. It was the 1990s; the Troubles were a background rumble (most of the ti…

Lydia Little tells the story of her extraordinary brother, Fergus O’Farrell, by bringing the reader through an intimate, raw account of his wake and funeral – all the while carrying the secret of how he really died. Fergus was the…

The focus of this book is an utterly neglected, important figure from the period leading up to the foundation of the Gaelic League and the early years of that movement, Pádraig Ó Laoghaire (1870–1896) from the Béarra Peninsula in …

Diary of An Activist is a social activism memoir journeying through vegetarianism, anti-nuclear and CND protests, feminist and queer activism, lesbian parties, coming out and becoming a parent. It features quirky Cork locations li…

Serial winners and glorious losers, heroes andvillains, trailblazing women, role models and rogues,all are here; so too are audacious sporting founders,enduring legends and forgotten or overlookedgreats. Through a selection of six…

The road to Croke Park can be a long one, but for Leitrim hurler Zak Moradi it was longer than most. Born in a refugee camp in Ramadi, Iraq, at the height of the Gulf War, Zak spent his formative years living under the oppressive …

We Don't Know Ourselves is a very personal vision of recent Irish history from the year of O'Toole's birth, 1958, down to the present. Ireland has changed almost out of recognition during those decades, and Fintan O'Toole's life c…

Irish rugby has produced many charismatic figures over its history. None more than Willie Anderson. Immortalised for his defiant stance in the face of the All Blacks' Haka, the Ulsterman is notorious also for his time spent locked…

A moving and lyrical memoir about life, love and loss, from a true giant of Gaelic games. In a frenetic seven-year spell at the outset of his senior managerial career, Mickey Harte led Tyrone to four Ulster Championships and three…

'My dictionary's first two definitions of 'comrade' are: A close companion. An intimate associate or friend. The third one is: A fellow soldier. My friends have been all those things to me.' In this stunning essay collection, awar…

Fight Or Flight: My Life, My Choices is the autobiography of Irish rugby legend Keith Earls. Keith Earls started out in senior rugby as a teenage star and during the course of his long career has become one of the most admired and…

Darkness into Light: A Nation’s Response tells the story of the birth of a national and international movement that, every year, brings hundreds of thousands of people together to walk and remember those who have died by suicide. …

Marise was nine when she first realised there was trouble, 14 when her Dad tried to end it all, and 23 when he finally succeeded. In a turmoil of conflicting emotions Marise runs - from Dublin to Amsterdam to Los Angeles, leaving …

Soon, the lockdown would start. People would die alone, without any proper ceremony. Charlotte's death would be washed away, the first drop in a downpour. Nobody knew it then but hers would be the last good funeral of the year. It…

"When my parents signed me up to Trojan Swimming Club, they had no idea of the evil behind Gibney's interest in me. As a thirteen-year-old, who knew nothing but kindness and love, I was ill-equipped to understand what was happenin…

As a relative newcomer to the United States, Maeve Higgins can see with gimlet eyes that our country is flawed. But that doesn't stop her from loving it. With piercing political commentary, and a perfect mix of sweetness and salti…

Patrick Kavanagh (1904-67) was one of Ireland's foremost poets, best known for 'The Great Hunger' and novel Tarry Flynn. He is also remembered for his cantankerous, sometimes volatile nature, fuelled by alcohol. In A Poet in the H…

Concern. Compassion. Doubt. Despair. Anger. Hope. Imagine juggling these feelings every day in a situation where your ability to manage them could be the difference between life and death. For Dr Chris Luke, a consultant in emerge…

An attractive and approachable selection of the work of George Bernard Shaw. One of the most remarkable writers of the 20th century, Shaw contributed in a range of ways to both political and social writings as well as creating gre…