Irish Non-Fiction

Looking for love – the most human quest of them all – has been transformed in recent years, with new technology removing the need to be in ‘the right place at the right time’. Dating has never been more convenient, varied or dispo…

The Irish nana is a repository of family history, memory and lore. Sometimes, like the Italian nonna, she is also a 'walking cookbook', carrying the old knowledge of how things were best done. Alice's own grandmothers, Nana Taylor…

This is the incredible story of how the GAA and its people managed to weather the coronavirus pandemic and re-emerge to fight another day. On St Patrick's Day 2020, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar announced that Ireland was locking down. O…

Crazy Dreams is the compelling and highly anticipated autobiography from Paul Brady, a musician whose remarkable career has spanned six decades and who is indisputably one of Ireland’s greatest living songwriters.This evocative me…

On the Beara peninsula in West Cork, a temperate rainforest flourishes. It is the life work of Eoghan Daltun, who had a vision to rewild a 73-acre farm he bought, moving there from Dublin with his family in 2009. An Irish Atlantic…

With over 400 letters, memos, cards, telegrams, drawings, notes and photographs, The Presidents' Letters reveals a personal and unexpected story of Ireland since the inauguration of our first president, Douglas Hyde. Most of these…

Road to Repeal: 50 Years of Struggle in Ireland for Contraception and Abortion opens in 1970 when the Irish Women's Liberation Movement burst onto the streets and screens of a society bewildered by women demanding equal status in …

When Gillian Hussey started out in Bridewell District Court in 1984, little did she realise that she would deal with some of the most notorious criminals in Ireland, including the Kinahans, the Cahills, 'The Monk' and John Gilliga…

When Catherine Corless began researching the Tuam Mother and Baby Home in Galway in 2010, she could not have known where her interest in local history would lead her. Uncovering no less than 796 missing burial records of children …

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…

Michael Viney and his wife Ethna lived in the city, had successful jobs in the media and had just turned forty when they made a life-changing decision: to give up everything for a self-reliant existence on a remote cottage farm in…

Will Ireland really reunite?Throughout the century since partition the unification of the two parts of the island seemed impossible. Many still feel that it is, particularly because of the bloody legacy of past conflict. However, …

The incendiary untold story of Ireland's response to the most significant public health emergency of the past century, woven from a wealth of original research and dozens of interviews with ministers, politicians, public health ex…

Have you heard of Frederick Hervey, the atheist Bishop of Derry who hated church bells? What about Samuel Boyce, the poet who couldn't afford trousers? Not even Mary Monckton, who once stole a live hedgehog from a dinner party? Th…

Ireland's Suffragettes is a collection of biographical essays introducing the suffragettes who influenced Ireland's struggle for women's rights. Many of the women were political activists while others became militant suffragettes …

Edited by Mary O'Dowd and Siobhan Fitzpatrick. Nine writers trace the public and private lives of nine sets of sisters. Artists, publishers, writers, educationalists, philanthropists, revolutionaries, suffragists - thinkers all. I…

This searingly intimate literary debut from top Irish art critic Cristín Leach weaves words and art with an unravelling of self that comes when a marriage breaks. In a multi-layered and incisive narrative, Leach writes abou…

For over thirty years, David McDonald worked in Ireland's three biggest prisons. This is his story. As a young officer, McDonald got a baptism by fire when he started in Mountjoy in 1989. It was a chaotic, smelly and overcrowded p…

Don't leave yet. Let there be one more piece of magic to remember the place by. Is there something especially Irish about Irish gardens? The climate, soils, availability of plants and skills of green-fingered people generate an un…