UCD Library Collection Spotlight: Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Awards 2014

A vibrant, intimate, hypnotic portrait of one woman’s life, from an important new writer Tess Lohan is the kind of woman that we meet and fail to notice every day. A single mother. A nurse. A quiet woman, who nonetheless feels things acutely—a woman with tumultuous emotions and few people to share them with.      Academy Street is Mary Costello’s luminous portrait of a whole life. It follows Tess from her girlhood in western Ireland through her relocation to America and her life there, concluding with a moving reencounter with her Irish family after forty years of exile. The novel has a hypnotic pull and a steadily mounting emotional force. It speaks of disappointments but also of great joy. It shows how the signal events of the last half century affect the course of a life lived in New York City.      Anne Enright has said that Costello’s first collection of stories, The China Factory, “has the feel of work that refused to be abandoned; of stories that were written for the sake of getting something important right . . . Her writing has the kind of urgency that the great problems demand” (The Guardian).      Academy Street is driven by this same urgency. In sentence after sentence it captures the rhythm and intensity of inner life.

From one of contemporary literature's bestselling, critically acclaimed and beloved authors, a magnificent new novel set in Ireland, about a fiercely compelling young widow and mother of four, navigating grief and fear, struggling for hope. Set in Wexford, Ireland, Colm Tóibín's superb seventh novel introduces the formidable, memorable and deeply moving Nora Webster. Widowed at forty, with four children and not enough money, Nora has lost the love of her life, Maurice, the man who rescued her from the stifling world to which she was born. And now she fears she may be drawn back into it. Wounded, strong-willed, clinging to secrecy in a tiny community where everyone knows your business, Nora is drowning in her own sorrow and blind to the suffering of her young sons, who have lost their father. Yet she has moments of stunning empathy and kindness, and when she begins to sing again, after decades, she finds solace, engagement, a haven-herself. Nora Webster is a masterpiece in character study by a writer at the zenith of his career. In Nora Webster, Tóibín has created a character as iconic, engaging and memorable as Madame Bovary or Hedda Gabler.

The latest novel from Joseph O'Connor is set mainly in England (Luton and London), Ireland and the US. It deals with the formation of a band in the early 80's, their struggle for recognition, playing low dives, living in transit vans etc followed by worldwide success, then the inevitable "artistic differences". The band get together years later in the present day to play a big benefit concert in Dublin for the guitarist, who is critically ill.
The book is wonderfully entertaining, insightful into the world of pop music and often extremely funny.

The riveting narrative of an honorable Irish priest who finds the church collapsing around him at a pivotal moment in its history Propelled into the priesthood by a family tragedy, Odran Yates is full of hope and ambition. When he arrives at Clonliffe Seminary in the 1970s, it is a time in Ireland when priests are highly respected, and Odran believes that he is pledging his life to “the good.”      Forty years later, Odran’s devotion is caught in revelations that shatter the Irish people’s faith in the Catholic Church. He sees his friends stand trial, colleagues jailed, the lives of young parishioners destroyed, and grows nervous of venturing out in public for fear of disapproving stares and insults. At one point, he is even arrested when he takes the hand of a young boy and leads him out of a department store looking for the boy’s mother.      But when a family event opens wounds from his past, he is forced to confront the demons that have raged within the church, and to recognize his own complicity in their propagation, within both the institution and his own family.      A novel as intimate as it is universal, A History of Loneliness is about the stories we tell ourselves to make peace with our lives. It confirms Boyne as one of the most searching storytellers of his generation.

Dublin, some years from now, and the President of the United States has just been assassinated during a state dinner in his honour. The official account has already taken hold but a hawk-eyed octogenarian named Monk, believing that there's nothing that cannot be known, has a version of his own -- a dark and twisted tale of both the watcher and the watched. "Nothing gets past a man as invisible as me," he says, introducing us to a cast of damaged characters he has kept under the strictest surveillance for years. Chief among them is Schroeder, recently sacked from Trinity College, where he once taught the Presidential daughter, and is now wandering the city streets in a medicated fugue as sinister and violent events begin to take control of his life. But this, says Monk, is no thriller or invented tale of suspense. It is, he insists, an honest and faithful record of breakage and distress at a time when dysfunction -- personal, local, national, global and even cosmic -- pervades all. A time when everything is already broken and when, in many ways, the shooting of a pill-popping President is neither here nor there. The only thing that matters, Monk tells us, is the truth. And this is why, stationed high in his attic room with a Stoli in a highball, he does what he does. "There's divinity in it," he says. "And a modicum of love."

Where women are created for the pleasure of men, beauty is the first duty of every girl. In Louise O'Neill's world of Only Every Yours women are no longer born naturally, girls (called "eves") are raised in Schools and trained in the arts of pleasing men until they come of age. Freida and Isabel are best friends. Now, aged sixteen and in their final year, they expect to be selected as companions--wives to powerful men. All they have to do is ensure they stay in the top ten beautiful girls in their year. The alternatives--life as a concubine, or a chastity (teaching endless generations of girls)--are too horrible to contemplate. But as the intensity of final year takes hold, the pressure to be perfect mounts. Isabel starts to self-destruct, putting her beauty--her only asset--in peril. And then into this sealed female environment, the boys arrive, eager to choose a bride. Freida must fight for her future--even if it means betraying the only friend, the only love, she has ever known.

Sam Leahy is a shy, fifteen-year-old boy navigating two social worlds: the uptight bullies at his all-boys' private school and the small uncouth gang in his neighbourhood. This gang of five follows the typical teenage-boy pattern: they drink, smoke, cause fights and vandalize property. Sam desperately wants to be accepted, but he soon finds that the only way to gain respect amongst the crew is to fight violence with violence. And it hurts. When it comes to girls, Sam is clueless, but when he inadvertently meets Antoinette, the girl of his dreams, who is perfect, blonde, slender and sexy, he is enamoured . . . only to learn that falling in love has a price. But being a teenager is all about redemption and recrimination, small events becoming catastrophic, and seemingly huge moments eventually meaning nothing. Through these events that shape a teen, Sam discovers the boundaries of sexuality, friendship, authority, and the possibility of death.

In an eighteen-year playing career for Cobh Ramblers, Nottingham Forest (under Brian Clough), Manchester United (under Sir Alex Ferguson) and Celtic, Roy Keane dominated every midfield he led to glory. Aggressive and highly competitive, his attitude helped him to excel as captain of Manchester United from 1997 until his departure in 2005. Playing at an international level for nearly all his career, he represented the Republic of Ireland for over fourteen years, mainly as team captain, until an incident with national coach Mick McCarthy resulted in Keane's walk-out from the 2002 World Cup. Since retiring as a player, Keane has managed Sunderland and Ipswich and has become a highly respected television pundit. As part of a tiny elite of football players, Roy Keane has had a life like no other. His status as one of football's greatest stars is undisputed, but what of the challenges beyond the pitch? How did he succeed in coming to terms with life as a former Manchester United and Ireland leader and champion, reinventing himself as a manager and then a broadcaster, and cope with the psychological struggles this entailed? In a stunning collaboration with Booker Prize-winning author Roddy Doyle, THE SECOND HALF blends anecdote and reflection in Roy Keane's inimitable voice.

In 2002, an eighty-five-year-old former civil servant was voted 'Irishman of the Century'. Widely regarded as "the architect of modern Ireland", T.K. Whitaker's life spans the history of the Irish state in whose economic, social and cultural evolution he played an integral and influential role. Born in Rostrevor, County Down, reared in Drogheda, County Louth, from modest beginnings, T.K. Whitaker's meteoric rise through the ranks of the civil service saw him at 39 years become the youngest Secretary of the Department of Finance. His was the quiet presence, the rational and informed voice behind many of the most momentous events in recent Irish history. His inspirational paper Programme for Economic Development became the blueprint for Ireland's regeneration in the 1960s. As Governor in the 1970s his vision and purpose transformed the Central Bank into a dynamic institution. And, as advisor to Taoiseach Jack Lynch and other political leaders, he played a crucial role behind the scenes in the movement towards peace in Northern Ireland. Drawn from in-depth interviews conducted with Dr Whitaker and his family, as well as exclusive access to his personal papers and correspondence, in Portrait of a Patriot author Anne Chambers reveals the quite extraordinary extent and diversity of T.K. Whitaker's work on behalf of the Irish State; his relationship with Irish and international political figures such as De Valera, Lemass, MacBride, Costello, Sweetman, Lynch, Haughey, FitzGerald, O'Neill, and Whitelaw; his policy struggles with governments and individual ministers. This personal and intimate biography also introduces Ken Whitaker the family man, his motivation, humour and compassion; the personal losses endured and the many highlights enjoyed. T.K. Whitaker's life story is a model of excellence, integrity and public duty, and as such is all the more relevant today when such practical patriotism seems largely absent in twenty-first-century Ireland.