Books Category – Page 2

New edition of “The Light Makers” launches in July 17

The 2nd edition of The Light Makers, Irish author Mary O’Donnell‘s stunning debut, will be published on 03 July 2017, and launch on 18 July at The Irish Writers’ Centre.

Originally published twenty five years ago by Poolbeg Press, the book was both a critical and commercial success, featuring on best seller lists and later named as The Sunday Tribune’s “Best Novel Of 1992.”

Aiming to make the availability of printed books a priority, 451 Editions will distribute the novel both in book shops and online – as well as in online paperback, Kindle and eBook formats. So that whatever way you like to read, The Light Makers is there for you.

Please join Mary O’Donnell for a launch event on 18 July at The Irish Writers’ Centre in Parnell Square, Dublin.

451 Editions2017-07-30T07:57:47+00:00June 21st, 2017|

“After Kafra” new publication date

After Kafra, Martin Malone’s hard-hitting novel about a soldier’s return to civilian life in Ireland is to be published now in 2018, in conjunction with the 60th Anniversary of the Irish Defense Forces’ first posting in the Middle East.

The theme and substance of this, Malone’s second novel, remains fresh for Irish readers, since Irish forces are needed and serve more than ever today in peacekeeping missions across the world.

The novel is also important in that it constitutes an Irish contribution to the growing genre of “post conflict literature”.

It deals with post-traumatic stress syndrome, the difficulties for an individual who has experienced war to settle back to a “normal” life and how the lives of anyone who has lived in a combat zone are affected forever by the experience.

Tough, heart breaking and a great read to boot, we look forward to the second edition of After Kafra in 2018.

451 Editions2017-07-30T07:57:47+00:00September 6th, 2016|

Anne Enright reviews “Memory and Desire” in Irish Times

Irish Laureate for fiction Anne Enright reviews: Click left for link, or read down:

Memory and Desire by Val Mulkerns review: the way we lived then

Val Mulkerns was a presence on the bookshelves of my childhood home. Her short stories in particular were read with the odd interest we bring to the work of someone close to us. Mulkerns’s husband was a colleague of my father’s in the Civil Service, and she was also a journalist and the mother of a journalist. (Her daughter, Maev Kennedy, worked at this newspaper for many years.)

Mulkerns was part of the texture of things, and this made her work harder to see, somehow. So it was with a peculiar sense of deja vu that I returned to the stories as an adult reader and recognised, for the first time, how good they are. Special Category, the first piece in this collection, echoes the life of her father, Jimmy Mulkerns, who was imprisoned in Knutsford jail and then Frongoch after fighting in the Four Courts during 1916.

The main character, Bartholmew Mullens, suffers deprivation and torture in prison at the hands of an Irishman in British uniform. He also receives an unexpected visit from a girl who hails from Drumcondra but is in England on holiday. He asks her to bring along her elder sister, Harriet, if she ever visits again.

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451 Editions2017-07-30T07:57:47+00:00June 8th, 2016|