West Cork is a magical place. We Irish know this, as do the international celebrities who have been attracted by its beauty and security. The countryside has remained unspoiled and the people unaffected. A Place Near Heaven is the story of a calendar year in West Cork, told in month-by-month observations of the natural world. Tranquil and beautifully written, it is a book in the finest tradition of writing on rural life and the natural world. In tracing the course of a full year, from January to December, Damien Enright captures the special atmosphere of the world in which he has chosen to live and which he loves with such obvious passion. A paragraph at random: 'Yesterday, after the weekend of half light, the weather changed again and it was a beautiful, flashing day, as sharp as Siberia but, down by the south-facing sea, as warm as Spain. Backed into a sunny corner, I again watched the kittiwakes dance over the whitecaps. Sprats, birds and seals were still at Coolbawn strand. Television wildlife, for all its joys, cannot compare with the reality.' Damien Enright's writing has drawn praise from Alice Taylor, Aidan Higgins, Tim Severin and Dick Warner, among others. A Place Near Heaven will establish him in the very first rank of Irish nature writers.

A Place Near Heaven

Damien Enright

Gill Macmillan Ltd

Walks of Courtmacsherry Bay and the Seven Heads (Damien Enright West Cork Walks)

Sports & Outdoors

Merlin Press

Easy Walks of West Dingle (Damien Enright West Cork Walks)

Travel

Europe

Six Easy Walks of Killarney and Kenmare (Damien Enright West Cork Walks)

Ibiza, 1960: on the beautiful Mediterranean island, the high-rise resorts are still decades away. By chance, Damien Enright, twenty-one-years old and Irish, arrives there with his wife and two children and finds a handful of down-at-heel foreign Bohemians leading wild, hedonistic lives. He and his wife get involved; their marriage quickly breaks down and he spends two heartbroken years in London before returning to Ibiza with a new partner and another child. They take LSD and inspired by dreams of a brave new world cross to the remote island of Formentera to lead 'alternative' lives. This is a decade before Howard Marks became 'Mr. Nice': the embryonic drug culture in the west is motivated not by profit but by idealism. Sometimes, the search for 'freedom' ventures not just beyond the mind but beyond the law. To sustain their families on Formentera, Enright and two desperado pals head to London in a beat-up car and do some risky travelers check scams. Then, restless and unsure of his love for his partner, he makes a hair-raising trek to Turkey in the depths of winter to find hashish for the group. Things go badly wrong and he find himself a fugitive, at the mercy of unreliable friends. This is road story, drug story, love story a parable about drug 'enlightenment' and the loss and rediscovery of love.

Dope in the Age of Innocence

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Books by Damien Enright