34:T412,

An Irish Independent Book of the Year.

As the great John McGahern used to say, there's verse, and there's prose, and then there's poetry; William Wall is a poet in both mediums' John Banville.

'An underrated veteran at the peak of his powers' Sunday Times.

'It's this mood of lives irreparably spoiled that make this bitter-tasting tale so potent' Daily Mail.

Grace and her mother and sisters live on an island off the west coast of Ireland. Their father is a successful writer of travel books that advocate a simpler way of life, though he is so seldom there that his family become the subjects of his social experiments and his children's freedom is indistinguishable from poverty.

Grace and Jeannie take turns to look after their little sister Emily. Then one day - Grace's day - a terrible tragedy occurs that changes everything. This is novel about a world of adult self-indulgence and the consequences of careless decisions and dishonest compromises.

35:T624,

Following the success of Abandoned Mansions of Ireland, Tarquin Blake documents more forgotten stately homes. These include Elsinore in County Sligo, where William and Jack Butler Yeats spent many childhood summers, and Gortnamona House in County Offaly, built by the 'heir to the principality of Ofelia' in 1803. Auburn House in County Westmeath was named after the 'deserted village' immortalised by the poet Oliver Goldsmith, whose father was a tenant on the estate. The heyday of the Irish country house began in the early 1700s, when most farmland in Ireland was owned by Anglo-Irish Protestant landowners. The land, worked by tenant farmers, fi nanced the increasing opulence of landowners' mansion houses. The Great Famine triggered a change of fortune: starving, penniless tenants could not pay rent and the landowners' fi nances went into decline. Later, the Land Acts transferred land into the ownership of the tenant farmers and, with their rental income removed, many landlor

John Byrne: Thomas Joseph Byrne Nation Builder [2013] paperback

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