Category: Debut

Accurate Measurements by Adam White is unusual in that it is a poetic celebration of the world of manual labour, of craftsmanship and doing things in the right way. There...

Age of the Microwave Dinner explores where we are as a society, along with universal themes of heartbreak, family, relationships, and death. Renowned for his thought-provoking work, these poems are...

Almost The Same Blue is the first collection of short stories from the double Hennessy Award winning writer John O’Donnell. Murder, lust, greed, and betrayal are just some of the...

An Experience on the Tongue bristles with vivid imagery and candid voices. Various threads weave throughout as we are deftly lead through changing landscapes by a diverse cast of characters...

Mullarkey’s style of story-telling is remarkable for its preoccupation with additional things. Most of his characters suffer from the condition of being inundated by the world around them, and by...

Bank Holiday Hurricane focuses on dislocation, disenchantment and second chances, told through linked stories set in and around a Northern Irish town, and further afield.

Bloodroot explores the frailty and complexity of human relationships, often addressing the question of what it means to ‘belong’ in the world.

Border Lines introduces us to a cast of characters who are vivid, yet understated. It is this polarity that makes them all the more compelling. Most notable is Ian, the...

Kimberly Campanello is attempting something new, something challenging and inspiring and radical, something that hasn’t been seen before in contemporary Irish poetry… not only does she succeed in this attempt,...

A storm-battered Côte d’Azur to midsummer heat-waves and Big Freezes in the west of Ireland, the stories in End of Days capture the circumstances of change: the aftermath of loves...

The collection delivers glimpses of life in the field — warts and all — with a vibrant blend of pathos, dark field humour and satire. Adding to the new genre...

In her debut collection of short fiction, Augé creates poignant and accurate outlines of the women and their places in the world. Against the backdrop of modern Ireland, she tells...

First the Feathers interrogates the position of the human in the natural world as a backdrop to a personal and political exploration of what it means to be alive —...

Four Thousand Keys, Linda McKenna’s second full-length poetry collection, explores themes of dispossession, dislocation and life on the margins between history and story. Combining archival sources, myth, family stories, ekphrasis...

Growing up in Colour articulates the silence and strangeness of the familiar and inhabits the shadowy terrain of growing up in a fast-changing Ireland, of what happened and what might...

Home is Neither Here Nor There, the debut poetry collection by Nandi Jola, explores the themes of Home, migration and the fragile relationships between human, animals and morals. As a...

Here are poems of wonder, imagination, grief, bewilderment and delight. Drawing on an awareness formed during a rural childhood, they record the natural world and the way we, as humans,...

A Kashmiri poet, who writes in English, spent his youth in New York and wound up in Ireland to win the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award, Rafiq became the first non-Irish...

In Spring We Turned to Water is the first full-length collection of poetry from Michael Dooley. It brings together poems of intricate watchfulness and stunning revelation from the natural world....

The poems in In the Museum of Misremembered Things revolve around the local, the historic and the mythic. Linda McKenna’s poems are based around historical events and themes with a...

Inheritance, the debut poetry collection by farmer-poet Miceál Kearney, include poems that convey both the beauty and the brutality of life on the farm.

Jewtown explores the journey of Jewish people who escaped the pogroms in Russia in the late 19th century, eventually settling in Cork City.

Keeping Bees is rooted in the sensual, celebrating the vibrant nature of the body in and out love. The poetry is raw and brave, joyful and funny.

Killer à la Carte introduces us to James Livingstone Gall, a respected restaurant critic, creative chef and serial killer, matched in evil by Claudia Catalano, heiress to an hotel empire.

It is what every serious writer sets out to do — to give voice to characters that do not have one. Susan writes in a very considered way about characters...

In the wilds of Connemara, a lone cowboy exacts a terrible revenge; an abused brother and sister settle scores with their ‘ol’ unkie’; a grieving man steers his river-craft towards...

We travel with a keenly observant man, and one of many moods; we glimpse his loves — of family, of nature and of the changing seasons, for example – share...

Palm Wine Tapper and The Boy at Jericho is the diary of a woman’s journey from the nature-rich countryside and the red-sanded desert to the Lego-like city. Written in the...

The poems in Peacekeeper reveal the little known landscapes and events experienced by soldiers sent to keep the peace in highly volatile situations — experiences and events that stay part...

Revolutions of Humming Things explores a sense of belonging and home in a contemporary Ireland in a state of flux.

The poems in The Day of the Three Swans work with the sense of place, the shifting ground of emotion and the pressure of politics and external events. There are...

Unafraid to delve down into the hot centre of his characters, O'Reilly’s ambition is to bring this craft of plain intensity to an Irish audience in fresh, well-crafted tales that...

The Lie of the Land is a beautiful mix of poems rooted in the landscape Elaine grew up in and those she discovered on some of her travels.

We’re presented throughout this collection with a kaleidoscope of the twists and turns and tricks of life — surprising, pleasurable, scary, unsettling, deadly, ordinary. There’s a dizzying mix of settings...

The Rag Tree Speaks is concerned with a sense of place, particularly questioning Irishness and the myriad voices within that familiar trope, trying to cut through easy clichés to explore...

The poems in The Space Between pick up on everyday incidents, expanding them in novel ways, creating miniature gems of acute observation on relationships or the domestic with a sprinkling...

The Woman on the Other Side is a book of exploration. The poetry invites the readers into a world of fragments, between physical and internal landscapes.

This Little World focuses both on the internal subjective world that we inhabit due to social media and 24/7 access to news sources, as well as the little worlds we...

This compelling collection presents twelve character-driven short stories that are set in London, New York and Ireland. The stories are populated with characters who are forced to deal with a...

For her, poetry is about playing with the words until something is revealed. The journey is everything, the destination something she knows is mostly out of her hands (review by...