Irish Non-Fiction Books

Beneath the crashing waves and jagged cliffs of Ireland's coastline lies a world few have ever seen, teeming with kaleidoscopic colour and untold beauty. Through the lens of internationally acclaimed underwater photographer Nigel …

The first collection of Booker Prize-winning writer Anne Enright's non-fiction writing about culture, literature and her own life.For thirty years Anne Enright has been paying attention: casting her lucid and distinctive gaze acro…

Every family has one. Every WhatsApp group. Every office.You know the type – the lane-hogger, the queue-jumper, the clueless loudmouth who somehow thinks they’re the normal one. But what exactly is a gobshite? And more…

Malcolm Macarthur was a well-known Dublin socialite.  Suave and urbane, he passed his days mingling with artists and aristocrats, reading philosophy, living a life of the mind. But by 1982, his inheritance had dwindled to almost n…

Get ready to go on an exciting adventure around Ireland. Unleash your imagination and sense of adventure as you discover Ireland like you’ve never seen it before! Armchair travellers of any age will be totally absorbed by Fatti Bu…

Bring the unique experience and flavours of Foxford Café into your home. Since starting with a small café nearly twenty years ago, head chef Kathleen Flavin has turned Foxford into a top food destination. Her recipes are easy to p…

We walk past remnants of our past every day without noticing. Our ancestors left echoes of themselves all around us, if we only know where to look and how to interpret the signs. These remnants lie all over Ireland, telling us of …

A beloved Irish institution, RTÉ Radio 1’s Sunday Miscellany has been woven into the lives of listeners for over half a century. Following on from the bestselling 2023 anthology, this collection brings together some of the best br…

The real story behind Dunnes Stores, the most quintessentially Irish shop of all, and the family drama behind it. This is the story of the extraordinary family behind one of Ireland's most famous businesses, Dunnes Stores, over th…

A new and definitive account of one of the most famous and mysterious manuscripts in the world. The Book of Kells is a mystery. It is distinct from all copies of the gospels from the early Middle Ages, not only in the quality and …

A Hunk: a strong, attractive man An Irish Hunk: something even better Hollywood has long been the home of the Hunk, but there’s a new man in town and he’s got heaps of charm and an accent that’ll make you swoon. Get ready for Os…

Peatlands – bogs, fens and heaths – are part of the Irish soul. Neither water nor land and yet both, they were once considered gateways to the otherworld. Bleak and beautiful, they are time capsules that hold a record of history g…

On frosty nights, as he sits by a flickering fire, Michael Harding withdraws into the stillness of winter and begins to reckon with age and death.As stories emerge from the shadows, we meet a young boy whose arrival brings hope, b…

This is a revised and enlarged edition of John Moriarty’s first published work, which has been out of print since 1994. A Book of Revelations mediated by stories and personal excursions in literature, philosophy and sacred writing…

Foreword by Dáithí Ó Sé Step back into a world where turf fires warmed the hearth, water was drawn from the well, and stories told by flickering candlelight lit up the night. In Old Ways to New Days, folklorist Shane Lehane brings…

What if the answers to our housing crisis weren’t locked in government policy or developer margins —but already being built, quietly, by communities across the world? In Our Homes, eco-builder and broadcaster Harrison Gardner expl…

Featuring 100 captivating portraits of many of Ireland’s greatest contemporary writers, alongside conversations with each on their writing life, Scribendi is a landmark book of portraits of Irish writers by internationally renowne…

Discover the gods, goddesses, heroes, and monsters from Celtic mythology with this beautiful book that captures the ancient stories and tales that captivated the Celts. Prepare to be entertained as you learn about the many myths a…

The story of the grassroots #WakingTheFeminists movement in Irish theater, a campaign that changed how we saw the world and reshaped the future both on and off the stage. When the Abbey Theatre's 2016 centenary program excluded wo…

You could say that Frank McNally is a travel writer – he writes while the world travels by! For almost twenty years, Frank’s name has occupied the byline of the ever-present and perennially entertaining 'Irishman&rsquo…

How do people transform a house or flat into a home that nourishes both body and soul? How do they engage in the alchemy of homemaking? This book focuses a scholarly lens on one homemaking practice, dresser- and delph-keeping in w…

Across artificial intelligence, climate change, food safety, transport and communication, the fields of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) are integral to modern society. Through a selection of 46 lives from t…

This book tells the stories of some great GAA locations and the people linked with them. It includes obvious places like Croke Park, the Polo Grounds, Hayes's Hotel, Biddy Early's lake, the family, to less obvious places like, Fij…

The two opposing political figures that shaped Irish life in the 1980s and beyond. In the 1980s, Irish politics was dominated by a fierce rivalry between Charles J. Haughey and Dr Garret FitzGerald, both leaders of their respectiv…

The head of the Guinness family tells the true story of how his ancestors created the largest brewery in the world. In this narrative non-fiction book, Arthur Edward Guinness, the 4th Earl of Iveagh and head of the Guinness family…

The Book of Chad or the Gospel of Teilo is the earliest extant Welsh version of the Latin Gospels. This is a reprint of Hopkins-James' transcription of the manuscript of 1934, with a critique, a history of the text, its charcteris…

A vivid description of the fierce and free Celtic spirit as it has been sustained through history, and a vision for living that spirit in the present.      

As in Great Britain, the period from the mid-1950s onward saw considerable changes to the railways of Ireland, including contraction, for example, the demise of the final narrow-gauge lines and the complexities of the division of …

Keane's subject is the fruitful tension between tradition and the poet's indivual talent, his legacy as it is made new in particular poems. In examining the poetry of William Butler Yeats, Keane traces literary, philosophic, and s…

Haunted English explores the role of language in colonization and decolonization by examining how Anglo-Celtic modernists W. B. Yeats, Hugh MacDiarmid, and Marianne Moore "de-Anglicize" their literary vernaculars.Laura O'Connor de…