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Himself.
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Dugan was my grandmother’s maiden name. Her family was from County Wexford, Ireland near Rosslare on the island’s east coast. In recent years I have extensively studied my Irish heritage and have discovered much about my family, and about the DNA running through my own Irish blood. The inquiry has revealed much about my love of storytelling, good conversation, and generally about the way I move through the world. As a writer of several books of personal narrative and fiction, I have tried to write books that capture a certain emotion, and now through my own ancestral discoveries, I understand how those emotions and familial ties are so tightly linked.
Very few writers capture the longings of young men trapped in small towns, struggling to escape to new and better worlds than does Donal Ryan.
I grew up in an Irish-German neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where few people ever left. I knew those kinds of men.
This book has many of the same elements of Ryan’s past work, yet it brings with it a profound take on Ireland itself. The novel is divided into several sections, each focusing on seemingly unrelated narratives, until the final section when the stories of the men in the novel heartbreakingly come together.
Throughout, Ryan captures the essence of Irish history—the good and the bad—and combines it with the country’s always-present profound and unexpressed emotions, and its beautiful yet curious contradictions.
The refugee. The dreamer. The penitent. From war-torn Syria to small-town Ireland, three men, scarred by all they have loved and lost, are searching for some version of home. Each is drawn towards a powerful reckoning, one that will bring them together in the most unexpected of ways.
I’m no particular expert on anything, but I know what I love in a book, and I’ve read approximately a million books, plus or minus. I’ve written novels with the hope that they will be funny and poignant in about equal measure, I value humor in books more than just about anything, and here I have listed books that I cherish.
Okay, but here’s the thing: It takes about 30 pages for Niall Williams to hit his stride. There’s a lot about weather at first, the whole Irish rain situation. Stick with it. Once Christy comes on the scene in this small Irish town, Faha, and is hoping to have a meeting with a woman he left at the alter 30 years before, and once our young narrator gets involved in his plan—BAM.
The reader is fully in the world of Faha as electricity is introduced into the village, as Noel begins to figure out love and the insanity that is normal around him—well, I did not want it ever to end, even as at the beginning I was waiting for it to begin. Another book to clutch to the heart.
Shortlisted for Best Novel in the Irish Book Awards
Longlisted for the 2020 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction
From the acclaimed author of Man Booker-longlisted History of the Rain
'Lyrical, tender and sumptuously perceptive' Sunday Times
'A love letter to the sleepy, unhurried and delightfully odd Ireland that is all but gone' Irish Independent
After dropping out of the seminary, seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe finds himself back in Faha, a small Irish parish where nothing ever changes, including the ever-falling rain.
But one morning the rain stops and news reaches the parish - the electricity is finally arriving. With it…
Dugan was my grandmother’s maiden name. Her family was from County Wexford, Ireland near Rosslare on the island’s east coast. In recent years I have extensively studied my Irish heritage and have discovered much about my family, and about the DNA running through my own Irish blood. The inquiry has revealed much about my love of storytelling, good conversation, and generally about the way I move through the world. As a writer of several books of personal narrative and fiction, I have tried to write books that capture a certain emotion, and now through my own ancestral discoveries, I understand how those emotions and familial ties are so tightly linked.
What could be more Irish than two old friends meeting in a pub to tell stories?
Thing is, one of the friends has a life-changing secret to tell. He’s left his wife and kids for another woman, a woman they both know from their school days. Throughout the night, in pub after pub, and pint after pint, the story of the friend’s new love is revealed as the conversation delves deeper into each man’s version of the past they have shared—their fathers, their lovers, and even their collective memories of their Irish childhoods.
At times the story is both amusing and genuinely moving.
'A profound examination of friendship, romantic confusion and mortality' John Boyne
One summer's evening, two men meet up in a Dublin restaurant. Old friends, now married and with grown-up children, their lives have taken seemingly similar paths. But Joe has a secret he has to tell Davy, and Davy a grief he wants to keep from Joe. Both are not the men they used to be.
As two pints turns to three, then five, Davy and Joe set out to revisit the haunts of their youth. With the ghosts of Dublin entwining around them - the pubs, the parties, the…
As a teacher, I spent forty years at the chalkface before finally achieving my ambition to be a published writer. My first novel was about a child migrant to Australia; my second about a little girl on the kinder transport. I wanted to write about strong women in world war two. All three of the mothers in my stories are separated from their children and have to make some tough decisions. I hope my readers will remember them for their courage and tenacity and that they’ll enjoy reading about them as much as I’ve enjoyed creating them.
I’m always intrigued by the stories older people have to tell about their war time experiences. I’m so glad I spoke to my own father about the war before he died, and I try to recognise this in my own novels. Suzanne shows us so well how a seemingly frail and elderly woman can hide a multitude of secrets, and Eva’s story is fascinating and beautifully told.
'Expect a tale of love, courage and being brave in the most dangerous of times' Woman's Way You can pay a terrible price for keeping a promise...
Evelyn Taylor-Clarke sits in her chair at Forest Lawns Care Home in the heart of the English countryside, surrounded by residents with minds not as sharp as hers. It would be easy to dismiss Evelyn as a muddled old woman, but her lipstick is applied perfectly, and her buttons done up correctly. Because Evelyn is a woman with secrets and Evelyn remembers everything. She can never forget the promise she made to the…
I have been teaching English for 25 years, both at the high school and middle school levels. And one thing I have seen in the lives of thousands of teenagers is that our days are filled with the most beautiful, amazing things, as well as the most devastating, tragic things. My own childhood was equal parts unconditional love and chaotic dysfunction. In fact, if life were a book, it would be on this list!
I love everything A.S. King. She is my absolute favorite YA author. Her books are weird and thoughtful, and they stick in my head forever. Her award-winning Please Ignore Very Dietz is no different. Vera’s (former!) best friend Charlie has died. While she’s struggling with family stuff, and drinking stuff, and working at pizza place stuff, she’s being haunted by Charlie’s ghost who insists she tells the police what she knows. The story itself is quirky, and Vera’s narration is clever. And, then, of course, there’s a twist at the end!
Vera’s spent her whole life secretly in love with her best friend, Charlie Kahn. And over the years she’s kept a lot of his secrets. Even after he betrayed her. Even after he ruined everything.
So when Charlie dies in dark circumstances, Vera knows a lot more than anyone—the kids at school, his family, even the police. But will she emerge to clear his name? Does she even want to?
Edgy and gripping, Please Ignore Vera Dietz is an unforgettable novel: smart, funny, dramatic, and always surprising.
I never outgrew the curiosity of wanting to know more about the things we fear. Plenty of monsters are just neat! But the more you learn about them, whether they’re animals like bears and sharks or figures of myth like werewolves and dragons, the more interesting they become. I wanted to take audiences deep inside a skin unlike their own so they could understand how it feels to be cast out and how much a monster might look down on us. Because the more you look at monsters, the more you recognize us in them.
The Brides of Dracula are a classic overlooked group. Most adaptations treat them like a sexy slideshow of danger, not allowed to do anything other than lust and hunger. They’re a flattened idea of feminine desire, put on Dracula’s leash.
S.T. Gibson breathes them to life (or undeath) by imagining what their long existence is like, constantly under a temperamental abuser’s thumb. Yes, they are angry and hungry, and they yearn, but it’s a deeply human yearning for more than companionship. You root for them to be the ones to plunge knives into the count’s heart.
S.T. Gibson's sensational novel is the darkly seductive tale of Dracula's first bride, Constanta.
This is my last love letter to you, though some would call it a confession. . .
Saved from the brink of death by a mysterious stranger, Constanta is transformed from a medieval peasant into a bride fit for an undying king. But when Dracula draws a cunning aristocrat and a starving artist into his web of passion and deceit, Constanta realizes that her beloved is capable of terrible things.
Finding comfort in the arms of her rival consorts, she begins to unravel their husband's dark…
In 2006, I told a friend I wanted to write a book about grieving the death of a friend. Despite the fact that I’d never written a book before, she gave me her enthusiastic approval. Six months later she was dead. She inspired me to turn that book idea into a series of little books: the Friend Grief series. Just as I was finishing the last one, I began work on a full-length book that took me back to my work in the early days of AIDS. When COVID began, I returned to writing about friend grief. And I lost over a dozen friends while I wrote the book.
College friends gathering after the suicide of one of their friends. If it sounds like the ‘80s film The Big Chill, you would be right…and wrong.
At first, I wasn’t sure I liked any of the characters. But Rowley digs deep into the lives of a group of far-flung friends in ways that surprised me. Layers are peeled back throughout the book, proving that the characters, like our friends, really are complicated and annoying and precious.
New York Times Bestseller A TODAY Show #ReadWithJenna Book Club Pick
A Big Chill for our times, celebrating decades-long friendships and promises—especially to ourselves—by the bestselling and beloved author of The Guncle.
It’s been a minute—or five years—since Jordan Vargas last saw his college friends, and twenty-eight years since their graduation when their adult lives officially began. Now Jordan, Jordy, Naomi, Craig, and Marielle find themselves at the brink of a new decade, with all the responsibilities of adulthood, yet no closer to having their lives figured out. Though not for a lack of trying. Over the years they’ve reunited…
In the ‘60s, everyone was reading—or claiming to have read—Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. I faked reading it, to appear cool. The idea of a road trip, though—characters running away, running toward, or often both—and the self-discovery that ensues—was so intriguing, I made it the heart of the novel I first drafted decades ago. I wrote about a middle-aged woman who flees her life to find a lost love and her lost youth, then put the manuscript away. For 30 years. When I retired from my social work career, I pulled it from the closet, revised it, and became an author at 74.
The author had me at the first line: “Boop loved her daughter to the moon and back, but Justine had a way of sucking the joy out of a room faster than a vampire bat.” This road trip story about three generations of women (Boop, her daughter, Justine—who’s not in the car, but her presence is—and Justine’s daughter, Eve) set against a background of family secrets, has a decidedly Southern tone. One imagines a narrator relating the story from a rocker on the front porch, a glass of sweet tea in her hand. Although there are lighthearted moments, this is a serious story, about familial expectations, mental illness, family secrets, estrangement, and three women trying to find their way back to themselves and to each other. Travelling with this unforgettable grandmother/granddaughter duo is a gift.
Eve Prince is done-with college, with her mom, with guys, and with her dream of fashion design. But when her best friend goes MIA, Eve must gather together the broken threads of her life in order to search for her.
When Eve's grandmother, Boop, a retiree dripping with Southern charm, finds out about the trip, she-desperate to see her sister, and also hoping to alleviate Eve's growing depression-hijacks her granddaughter's road trip. Boop knows from experience that healing Eve will require more than flirting lessons and a Garlic Festival makeover. Nevertheless, Boop is frustrated when her feeble efforts yield the…
I’m an avid reader and writer of children’s literature, though I find it difficult to read anything that isn’t diverse these days. Being able to experience the world from the perspectives of other cultures is a true delight, and I learn something every time. After having read dozens of these diverse books, especially diverse fantasies, I find that nothing inspires my creative soul more. That’s why I’m able to speak on this topic for large conferences and schools, spreading this inspiration to others. And, as a published author of diverse children’s literature, I’ve done the same in my writing with praise from Kirkus, Booklist, Publisher’s Weekly, and many others.
Khan’s Pakistani-inspired heroine Nura proves uniquely cunning as she goes from being a child laborer to discovering an entrance into the world of the jinn.
If you don’t know anything about the jinn, it is that they are tricksters who will try and trap you, and that’s exactly what happens to Nura. Only, what makes Nura so special is that she is cunning too.
I loved watching her outsmart the immortal beings in this supernatural world.
A magical adventure rooted in Muslim culture and tradition, Nura and the Immortal Palace follows a young girl's journey from modern-day Pakistan into the world of the jinn.
Nura has worked all her life in the mica mines, earning just enough to keep her family afloat - and enjoy the odd delicious gulab jamun from the market. Some day she's going to find the Demon's Tongue, a legendary treasure buried deep in the mines, and her family will never have to worry about money again.
But when a terrible accident buries her best friend below ground, Nura goes in search…
I’ve always been drawn to stories that feature mysterious locales and secret objects and strange or magical occurrences, so books with these elements—particularly when the main characters in the books are young people learning about themselves and the world around them—are often very satisfying to me. There’s something naturally engaging, I believe, in tales where someone is thrust into a disorienting situation and has to make sense of the uncertainty he or she faces. The books I’ve written for young readers all tend in this direction, and so I’m always on the hunt for stories along these same lines.
Trenton Lee Stewart’s follow-up to his enormously popular and influential “Mysterious Benedict Society” series was received with puzzlement by many fans expecting a retread of the MBS adventures, but I find this audacious, intricately-plotted, wildly implausible tale somewhat irresistible. It all kicks off when eleven-year-old Reuben, at once introverted and adventure-seeking, discovers a strange watch that ensnares him in deep troubles. Finding his way out proves endlessly complex and bewildering as Reuben sifts through one peril after the next. It’s a beguiling tale for those doubly-willing to suspend disbelief—Stewart dares the reader to try.
This provocative analysis of U.S. relations with Cambodia from the 1950s to the present illuminates foreign policy issues that remain especially pertinent in the aftermath of the Cold War, as we attempt to formulate new approaches to a changed but still threatening international situation. Based on interviews with more than 100 diplomats, journalists, and scholars who have been involved with the Cambodian peace process, Michael Haas' book brings to light new information on a complex chain of events and casts doubt on official accounts of U.S. policies toward Cambodia.
Haas sorts through the tangle of misinformation, anti-communist hysteria, secret operations,…
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