Fairies in Ireland prefer to be known as the Little People, the Good Poeple or the Gentry. Between of the covers of this delightful book you will meet the devious Sidhe, bad-tempered Leprechauns, jolly Cluricauns, the Grogoch, the Dullahan, the Red Man, the Grey Man, Changelings, Banshees, Fairy Animals and many more. Interspersed with descriptions of habitat, habits, appearance and level of threat to the general public, are a series of charming stories about these Little People enhanced by original illustrations. It contains essential advice on how to deal with these characters, if you ever happen to come across any of them.

The Little People of Ireland

Literature & Fiction

Aine Connor

Short Stories & Anthologies

Somerville Press

Sleepwalker

John Toomey

Literary

Child of the Irish Border

Fitzsimon, Nicholas

One Mortal Night: A Miscarriage of Justice

History

Kelleher, Patrick

Europe

WE ARE BESIEGED by Barbara Fitzgerald was originally published in 1946. This fascinating first novel deals with the burning-out of an Anglo-Irish family in 1922 and what happens to them during the subsequent ten years. The backdrop for most of the novel is a Georgian house in Fitzwilliam Square in Dublin, where the family tries to deal with the new Ireland in their different ways. Two attractive sisters, the self-willed Isobel and the more endearing Caroline, grow up in a society where there are no officers to dance with, no Viceregal Drawing-rooms to assure them position. When the British left Southern Ireland, many of the Anglo-Irish remaining in the country felt like aliens, besieged in a hostile land. While some adapted to the new regime, others, such as Isobel and Caroline's mother, neither could nor would. Their sons and daughters grew up as a generation that could hardly remember the British. Families were divided against themselves, children against their parents.

We Are Besieged

Fitzgerald, Barbara

Genre Fiction

Nothing Quite Like It tells the story of an unusual childhood. The child of academic parents, the author was transplanted from Illinois to rural Wicklow in the 1950s. While his classicist father continued to spend part of the year teaching at the University of Chicago, he with his sister and philosopher mother Marjorie Grene settled down on the family farm in Ballinaclash.With this mixed background, he provides the sharp-eyed and affectionate perspective of an outsider on his experiences of childhood and adolescence; schooldays as just one of thirteen children in the local Protestant National School; the day-to-day work on a farm still worked with horses; the rigors of boarding school in Drogheda from the age of nine; the very different scene represented by living in Belfast; simultaneously starting college and farming on his own account. This vivid and wryly humorous memoir recalls a vanished world from a unique angle.

Nothing Quite Like It: An American-Irish Childhood

Biographies & Memoirs

Grene, Nicholas

Arts & Literature

Rosenheim & Windemere

Brian Lalor

Memoir of third generation cattle dealer and racehorse owner

Cattleman

Keogh, Raymond

Historical

In PETER SOMERVILLE-LARGE's elegant and scathingly witty novel, Paul Blake-Willoughby, the only child of a mixed marriage, is brought up on an Irish country estate by a Catholic soldier father and an eccentric Protestant mother. Against the backdrop of a large crumbling mansion, various factions, which include his Protestant teachers, a wealthy Church of Ireland Bishop and a succession of Catholic priests, war hilariously over his soul. It is a brilliant and extremely funny examination of the topics of snobbery, bigotry and infidelity. The end of the novel is a cruel surprise, reflecting a lifetime of unresolved problems.

Mixed Blessings: A Novel

Somerville-Large, Peter

Humor & Satire

In 1960 the Irish people were devastated by news that nine of the soldiers that they had sent to the Congo as part of a U.N. peace mission had been killed by warriors. As the funeral cortSge passed through Dublin, it was watched by thousands of people in one of the biggest shows of emotion ever seen in the capital. They knew that the soldiers had been killed in an ambush, but precious little else. Soon afterwards journalist Tom McCaughren began a two-year search to find out what had happened. The story that emerged was of a small group of soldiers deployed in hostile bush country, their fear that warriors called `the Cats' were closing in, `magic water' rituals, an ambush, a daring raid on a tribal stronghold to snatch some of the perpetrators, a dramatic trial and a secret mission to find a gallant soldier missing in action.

The Peacemakers of Niemba: The Full Story of the Congo Ambush

McCaughren, Tom.

Africa

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