At Swim-Two-Birds
3.490 kr.Flann O’Brien’s innovative metafictional work, whose unruly characters strike out their own paths in life to the frustration of their author, At Swim-Two-Birds is a brilliant impressionistic jumble of ideas, mythology and nonsense published in Penguin Modern Classics.
Flann O’Brien’s first novel tells the story of a young, indolent undergraduate, who lives with his curmudgeonly uncle in Dublin and spends far too much time drinking with his friends. When not drunk or in bed he likes to invent wild stories peoples with hilarious and unlikely characters – but somehow his creations won’t do what he wants them to.
A dazzling work of farce, satire, folklore and absurdity that gives full rein to its author’s dancing intellect and Celtic wit, At Swim-Two-Birds is both a brilliant comic send-up of Irish literature and culture, and a portrayal of Dublin to compare with Joyce’s Ulysses.
Brian Ó Nualláin, (1911-1966), better known by his pseudonym Flann O’Brien, was born in Strabane, County Tyrone, and studied at University College Dublin before joining the Irish Civil Service.
The Third Policeman
3.490 kr.A masterpiece of black humour from the renown comic and acclaimed author of At Swim-Two-Birds – Flann O’Brien.
A thriller, a hilarious comic satire about an archetypal village police force, a surrealistic vision of eternity, the story of a tender, brief, unrequited love affair between a man and his bicycle, and a chilling fable of unending guilt, The Third Policeman is comparable only to ‘Alice in Wonderland’ as an allegory of the absurd.
Distinguished by endless comic invention and its delicate balancing of logic and fantasy, The Third Policeman is unique in the English language.
plastic
3.990 kr.Set during a single twelve-hour night shift in a factory, plastic is a book-length poem exploring the life of the industrial worker turned poet.
Bringing together memoir, ekphrasis and satire, Bplastic is based on Matthew Rice’s experience working in a plastic moulding factory for ten years. Illustrating alienated twenty-first-century Irish labour in poetic form, plastic engages with the inflictions and implications of a ‘post-industrial’, ‘post-Troubles’ society, all while weaving in depictions of factory work from literature, film and the visual arts.
Time-stamped to highlight the claustrophobia of the worker’s experience, this is a poem about feeling a calling while being submerged in the world of menial labour – making plastic airplane parts by night, making poetry by day, uniting what Jacques Rancière calls the ‘labourers in love with the intellectual nights’ and those ‘intellectuals in love with the toilsome and glorious days of the labouring people.’ plastic’s evocation and lucidity moves with grace through working class realities and hopeful imaginings.
Every One Still Here
3.490 kr.A young girl spends her days on a double-decker bus. A bride-to-be prays to St Valentine’s bones. Bouquets are found all over a museum. Teenagers gather to dissect a human body. Brimming with compassion and thrumming with energy, these stories are scrupulous in their attention to detail, epic in their scope. In this bravura debut collection, Liadan Ní Chuinn delivers a consummate blend of the personal and the political.
Falling Animals
3.490 kr.On an isolated, windswept beach, a pale figure sits serenely against a sand dune staring out to sea. His hands are folded neatly in his lap and there is a faint smile on his otherwise lifeless face. After months of fruitless investigation, the nameless stranger is buried in an unmarked grave, but the mystery of his life and death lingers on, drawing the nearby villagers into its wake. From strandings to shipwrecks, it is not the first time that strangeness has washed up on their shores.
As a chorus of voices come together to unravel the story of one man, alone on a beach, a crosshatched portrait begins to emerge, threaded by lives both true and imagined, real and surreal, past and present.
The Catastrophist
990 kr.Gillespie, an Irishman, goes to the Congo in 1959 in pursuit of his beautiful lover Ines, a passionate Italian journalist. Unlike her, Gillespie has no interest in the deepening independence crisis, nor in the charismatic leader, Patrice Lumumba. He has other business: this is his last chance to make love work for him.
Intermezzo
3.490 kr.Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties – successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women – his enduring first love Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.
Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.
For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude – a period of desire, despair and possibility – a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.
Seint og um síðir
4.590 kr.Þessi bók geymir þrjár firnasterkar sögur sem eiga sameiginlegt að fjalla um samskipti kynjanna.
Í titilsögunni Seint og um síðir fylgjum við Cathal fara inn í helgina á meðan hann rifjar upp samskipti sín við unnustuna sem rann honum úr greipum. Í Langur og kvalafullur dauðdagi kemur rithöfundur í sumarhús Heinrichs Böll til að dvelja við skriftir, en ágengur aðkomumaður raskar ró hennar, og í sögunni Suðurskautið ákveður gift kona í helgarferð að sleppa fram af sér beislinu og upplifa hvernig það sé að sofa hjá öðrum manni.
Allar sögurnar skoða hvernig væntingar, tilætlunarsemi og undirliggjandi hætta á ofbeldi lita samskipti fólks.
Malone Dies
3.190 kr.Malone, a decrepit old man, lies naked in his bed, scrawling bitter observations in an exercise book. He is fed on a bed-table, his chamber pot is emptied, he hooks items with his stick, he looks out of the window. He tells the story of a man, looked after by nurses, taken for an ill-fated picnic on an island in the sea. As his mind disintegrates, so does the novel . . .
Malone Dies is the second of the three great novels Samuel Beckett produced during his ‘frenzy of writing’ in the late 1940s. The others are Molloy and The Unnamable.
Foster
3.490 kr.It is a hot summer in rural Ireland. A girl is sent to live with foster parents on a farm, not knowing when she will return home. In the strangers’ house, she finds a warmth and affection she has not known before and slowly begins to blossom in their care. But in a house where there are meant to be no secrets, she discovers how fragile her idyll is.
Millileikur
4.690 kr.Tveir bræður, þrjár ástkonur, sorg, átök og uppgjör: Millileikur er einstaklega áhrifamikil saga um ást, missi og órofa tilfinningabönd eftir hina írsku Sally Rooney, sem hefur vakið heimsathygli fyrir skáldsögur sínar.
Pétur er ríflega þrítugur lögmaður og lifir erilsömu lífi í hringiðu borgarinnar. Hann skemmtir sér grimmt og gistir oft hjá Naomi, sem er ung og villt, en er líka í nánu sambandi við Sylvíu, fyrrverandi unnustu sína sem hann getur ekki hætt að elska. Ívan er tíu árum yngri, var áður upprennandi skáksnillingur en hefur staðnað og líf hans er stefnulaust. Hann er feiminn einfari en þegar hann hittir Margréti, konu á fertugsaldri með erfitt hjónaband að baki, bresta allar varnir og milli þeirra kviknar eldheit ást.
Faðir þessara ólíku bræðra er nýdáinn og sorgin ristir inn í kviku; báðir eru næmir og viðkvæmir, taugarnar þandar. Ástandið leiðir til óbærilegrar spennu, samskiptin eru erfið og hvor um sig þarf að gera upp líf sitt og langanir.
Bókin rauk beint á topp metsölulista The Sunday Times, hefur setið á listum mánuðum saman og var víða kjörin besta bók ársins 2024. Bjarni Jónsson þýddi.
The Forester’s Daughter
2.590 kr.The evening is fine. In the sky a few early stars are shining of their own accord. She watches the dog licking the bowl clean. This dog will break her daughter’s heart, she’s sure of it.
Claire Keegan’s mesmeric story takes us into the heart of the Wicklow countryside, and of the farming family of Victor Deegan, with his ‘three teenagers, the milking and the mortgage’.When Deegan finds a gun dog and gives it as a present to his only daughter, his wife is filled with foreboding at this seeming act of kindness. As the seasons pass, long-buried family secrets threaten to emerge.
Small Things Like These
3.490 kr.It is 1985, in an Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, faces into his busiest season. As he does the rounds, he feels the past rising up to meet him – and encounters the complicit silences of a people controlled by the Church.
Antarctica
3.490 kr.A secret one-night tryst in the city. A sister’s revenge. A love-struck doctor. A missing girl.
In Antarctica, an astonishing sequence of stories, one of our most gifted writers illuminates human longing and fallibility in all its variety.
So Late in the Day
3.490 kr.After an uneventful Friday at the Dublin office, Cathal faces into the long weekend and takes the bus home. There, his mind agitates over a woman named Sabine with whom he might have spent his life, had he acted differently. All evening, with only the television and a bottle of champagne for company, thoughts of this woman and others intrude – and the true significance of this particular date is revealed.
From one of the world’s great writers, So Late in the Day asks if a lack of generosity might ruin what could be between men and women.
