Women Behind the Door, Roddy Doyle (hardback Sept 2024)
£20.00
Booker-Prize winner Roddy Doyle’s spectacular return to his iconic heroine, Paula Spencer‘
At sixty-six, Paula Spencer – mother, grandmother, widow, addict, survivor – is finally living her life. A job at the dry cleaners she enjoys, a man – Joe – with whom she shares what she wants, friends who see her for who she is, and four grown children, now with families and petty dramas the likes of which Paula could only have hoped for. Despite its ghosts, Paula has started to push her past aside.
That is until Paula’s eldest, Nicola, turns up on her doorstep. Independent, affluent, a loving wife and mother, “a success” – Nicola is suddenly determined to leave it all behind. Over the next few days, as Nicola gradually confides in Paula the secret that unleashed this moment of crisis, mother and daughter find themselves untangling anecdotes, jokes, memory and revelation to confront the bruised but beautiful symmetry of what each means to the other.
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The Vanishing Elephant, Charles Way and Sabine Dargent
£9.99
In the heart of Bengal, a young boy named Opu dreams of becoming an elephant trainer. When he befriends Janu, an Asian elephant, their friendship is a first step on an adventure so huge, it spans decades and continents. On their separate paths, they face fearsome encounters, stormy seas and strange new worlds.
It works as a great story to read aloud to younger children and to share with older children, the layout and shape of the book is great for shared reading.
This moving story of friendship and belonging from award winning theatre company Cahoots was named Critic's Pick by the New York Times. The live show is coming to Belfast for one week only this Autumn! Don't miss it - book via the Grand Opera House Belfast, at www.goh.co.uk.
The Glassmaker, Tracy Chevalier ( hardback 12 September)
£20.00
Spellbinding…. Chevalier at her fabulous best.
A rich, vivid and gently enchanting novel' ELIF SHAFAK
Venice, 1486. Across the lagoon lies Murano. Time flows differently here – like the glass the island’s maestros spend their lives learning to handle. Women are not meant to work with glass, but Orsola Rosso flouts convention to save her family from ruin. She works in secret, knowing her creations must be perfect to be accepted by men. But perfection may take a lifetime.
Skipping like a stone through the centuries, we follow Orsola as she hones her craft through war and plague, tragedy and triumph, love and loss. The beads she creates will adorn the necks of empresses and courtesans from Paris to Vienna – but will she ever earn the respect of those closest to her? Tracy Chevalier is a master of her own craft, and The Glassmaker is vivid, inventive, spellbinding: a virtuoso portrait of a woman, a family and a city that are as everlasting as their glass.
Intermezzo - Sally Rooney ( Hardback 24 September)
£20.00
From the author of the multimillion-copy bestseller Normal People, an exquisitely moving story about grief, love and family. Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common. 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.
The Turning Tide, Jon Gower ( paperback August 2024)
£10.99
Fascinating, spellbinding, erudite and great fun.’ Roddy Doyle
The Turning Tide is a hymn to a sea passage of world-historical importance. Combining social and cultural history, nature-writing, travelogue and politics, Welshman Jon Gower charts a sea which has carried both Vikings and saints; invasion forces, royals and rebels; writers, musicians and fishermen.
The divided but interconnected waters of the Irish Sea – from the narrow North Channel through St George’s Channel to where the Celtic sea opens out into the wide Atlantic – have a turbulent history to match the violence of its storms. Jon Gower is a sympathetic and interested pilot, taking the reader to the great shipyards of Belfast and through the mass exodus of the starving during the Irish Famine in coffin boats bound for America. He follows the migrations of working men and women looking for work in England and tells the tales of more casual travellers: sometimes seasick, often homesick too.
The Irish Sea is also a place with an abundant natural history. The rarest sea bird in Europe visits its coasts in summer while the rarest goose wings in during winter. The Turning Tide navigates waters teeming with life, filled with seals and salt-tanged stories and surveyed by seabirds.
Lyrically written and fizzing with curiosity, this is a remarkable and far-reaching book.
