By the author of "The Fallen" which won the 1993 "Irish Times" prize for best first book of fiction. Most of the 16 stories are set in rural landscapes where people inhabit a world made fraught by their response to their pasts and by the limitations that their personal histories impose upon them.

A Year of Our Lives

Literature & Fiction

MacKenna, John

Contemporary

Picador

In this intensely lyrical novel, spoken through the voices of Clare's womenfolk and of the dying Clare himself, MacKenna brilliantly evokes the emotional life of one of England's most tragic and influential pastoral poets whose 200th anniversary was celebrated in 1993.

Clare: A Novel

British & Irish

Blackstaff Pr

Absent Friend: A meditation on a friendship with Leonard Cohen

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Harvest Press

Publication Date: Jan 2003Eighty years after his death, the legend of Ernest Shackleton and the extraordinary story of the Endurance South Pole expedition of 1914-17 still holds a grip on the public imagination. Trapped in drifting polar pack ice for ten months, Shackleton and his crew fought for survival. When the Endurance was crushed, they were stranded on the ice-floes for over a year before reaching Elephant Island. From there Shackleton and his five men embarked upon one of maritime history's most remarkable rescue missions, sailing to South Georgia across 800 miles of the world's roughest seas in a small open boat. This book probes deep into family history to reveal the profound influence of Ernest Shackleton's Irish Quaker roots in the making of a great leader. The fruit of years of intensive research, Shackleton: An Irishman in Antarctica paints a vivid portrait of a man whose ambition was always tempered by his humanity and egalitarianism. Here too are the untold stories of Shackleton's upbringing in Kildare; his time in the Merchant Navy; his marriage and love affairs; his life as public man and politician; and the haunting story of his final - and fatal - 1921-22 expedition on the Quest. Drawing on family records, diaries and letters - and hitherto unpublished photographs and archive material - this mesmerizing book takes us beyond the myth to Shackleton the man, the hero who eschewed imperial hierarchy, whose greatest triumph was life over death.

Shackleton: An Irishman in Antarctica

Leaders & Notable People

The Lilliput Press

The Space Between Us tells the story of an Irish architect who loses his wife, Beth, in a car accident, and is left to bring up his three-year-old daughter alone. In the immediate aftermath of Beth's death, his emotions lurch from relief to guilt: relief because he no longer has to pretend to have any interest in a relationship that has been falling apart for some time, and guilt because he did not have the courage to talk to Beth before her death. As time goes by, and his daughter Jane grows up, father and daughter grow closer. The reader gradually realises that this relationship is not as it should be. A disturbing and shocking story, deftly told.

The Space Between Us

Literary

New Island

Clare

New Island Books

And then we told them. The first thing that happened was that everything was swept off the table, crockery and cutlery crashed and clanged on the tiled floor. I didn t mind that; I was expecting it. The next thing that happened was that a chair hit the wall behind my head and I didn t mind that, I was expecting that, too. Then the table was overturned and I had to admire her father s determination. It was a fine piece of furniture, solid cedar, and it took some effort for a guy of his size to overturn it. Then her father crossed the kitchen and his face was about six inches from my chest, turned upward like a flaming sun, shooting out asteroids of egg and bread that spattered my face. Relocated temporally to the 1970s, Joseph explores the story of Christ's adoptive father in a modern setting. It delves deep into the bond of father and son and imagines the emotions, feelings and life of the man who took the responsibility for safeguarding the son of another. It explores the isolation and alienation of a good man in a world he struggles to understand and the impact on him of the choices made by his wife, his son and those surrounding him. Alive with rich imagery and a compelling, multi-layered narrative, Joseph is written in the beautiful prose characteristic of John MacKenna.

Joseph

'I'm not an impulsive person. Twice in my life I've done impulsive things. The first time was when I packed a bag, walked out on my wife and kids, left my job and hit the road to follow the Captain. Goodbye was all she wrote.' These wide-ranging stories follow the disparate disciples of the Captain - a mysterious, powerful and magnetic figure whose violent and chaotic death at the hands of the army radically alters their lives in myriad ways. From rural North American farms and dive bars to the suburbs of Ireland and the sands of Palestine, we witness their struggles to find a place, a peace, in a world that is fractured and incomplete. Once We Sang Like Other Men is a surprising, mysterious, lyrical and affecting collection with a stunning range of voice from a recognised master of the form.

Once We Sang Like Other Men

We Seldom Talk About the Past&nbsp;is John MacKenna's first selected collection of short stories, from a career spanning over three decades. The stories selected come from four collections of short fiction, and represent a culmination of MacKenna's work in a form of writing he has made uniquely his own. Often compared to John McGahern, and Raymond Carver, and deeply influenced by masters of the form like Chekov, MacKenna's stories focus on the quotidian truths of our lives, of the momentousness of small moments, of sexual desire and its intimate entanglement with the domestic, of deeply felt absences and social mores, and always at the heart of his work, the sense of place, often the rural, and the acute receptiveness of our lives to the places we inhabit.

We Seldom Talk About the Past: Selected Short Stories

A secondhand copy with some wear and shelf wear. Good reading copy.

The Lost Village: Portrait of an Irish Village in 1925

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Books by MacKenna, John