Touchy Subjects is about things that make people wince: taboos, controversies, secrets and lies. Some of the events that characters crash into are grand, tragic ones: miscarriage, overdose, missing persons. Other topics, like religion and money, are not inherently taboo, but they can cause acute discomfort because people disagree so vehemently. These stories are about the spectrum of feeling that runs from awkwardness through embarrassment to shame.

Set in the second half of the eighteenth century, Barry Lyndon is the fictional autobiography of an adventurer and rogue. Born into the petty Irish gentry, and outmanoeuvred in his first love-affair, a ruined Barry volunteers for the British army. After seeing service in Germany he deserts and, after a brief spell as a spy, pursues the career of a gambler in the dissolute clubs and courts of Europe. In a determined effort to enter fashionable society he marries a titled heiress but is fina...

Vincent Naylor is a professional thief; just ten days out of jail and he's preparing his next robbery. But his plan is already unravelling. Maura Coady, a retired nun, calls Detective Sergeant Bob Tidey believing there's something suspicious happening in her Dublin backstreet. Maura's call inadvertently unleashes a storm of violence that will engulf Naylor and force Tidey to make a deadly choice.

Inspired by the true events of the most notorious evictions in Irish history…1861, Donegal, IrelandTen years ago Declan Conaghan’s father died in the Great Famine, and since then, Declan has kept his promise to keep his family out of the workhouse. But all that is threatened with the arrival of new landlord, John Adair. Adair is quick to cause trouble and fear among his tenants. When he turns them off his land, Declan has no option but to break his promise…...

THE GLOBALIST is the first in-depth biography of an international power-broker who was instrumental in shaping the global economy that we know today.PETER SUTHERLAND played a defining role in world history over the past 25 years and was arguably the most influential Irish person ever to have lived. He was Ireland’s youngest ever attorney general; the youngest ever European Commissioner; UN special representative for migration; and special adviser to the Vatican.His landmark...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Battle by Paul O'Connell, read by John Cormack.There has never been a rugby player quite like Paul O'Connell. His name is synonymous with passion, heart and determination. But he is also the thinking man's rugby player, a legendary student of the game.As the heartbeat of Munster, British and Irish Lions captain in 2009, and captain of the first Ireland team to retain the Six Nations championship, O'Conn...

Kennedy Marr is a novelist from the old school. Irish, acerbic, and a borderline alcoholic and sex-addict, his mantra is drink hard, write hard and try to screw every woman you meet.He’s writing film scripts in LA, fucking, drinking and insulting his way through Californian society, but also suffering from writers block and unpaid taxes. Then a solution presents itself – Marr is to be the unlikely recipient of the W. F. Bingham Prize for Outstanding Contribution to...

Resurrecting buried scandals, audacious hoaxes and private tragedies, Emma Donoghue has written a sequence of short stories about peculiar moments in the history of the British Isles. Here artists mix with poisoners and countesses rub shoulders with cross-dressers, vicars and revolutionaries; the Second Coming is proclaimed in Scotland; and a miniature girl becomes a tiny skeleton in a London museum.

This fascinating, fact-inspired fiction collection from Emma Donoghue, author of the bestselling Room, is a sequence of fourteen stories about travels to, in, and from North America.With the turn of each page, the characters that roam across these pages go astray. They are emigrants, runaways, drifters; gold miners and counterfeiters, attorneys and slaves. They cross borders of race, law, sex, and sanity. They travel for love or money, under duress or inco...

In a world prone to violent flooding, Britain, ravaged 20 years earlier by a deadly virus, has been largely cut off. Survivors are few and far between, most of them infertile. Children are a rare commodity. For 22-year-old Roza Polanski, life with her family in their isolated tower block is relatively comfortable. But when a stranger called Aashay Kent arrives, everything changes. Roza can't shake the feeling that there's more to Aashay than he's letting on. Is there more to life beyond th...

An illegal immigrant is killed in a hit-and-run on a frozen mountain road in the rich Hollywood resort town of Fairview, Colorado. No one is prosecuted for his death, and his case is quietly forgotten.Six months later, posing as an illegal immigrant and working as a maid in Fairview, Havana police officer Detective Mercado begins to secretly investigate the shadowy collision that left her father dead. Who killed him? Was it one of the smooth-talking Hollywood types or a minion of t...

Rea Carlisle has inherited a house from an uncle she never knew. It doesn’t take her long to clear out the dead man’s possessions, but one room remains locked. When Rea finally forces it open she discovers inside a chair, a table – and a leather-bound book. Inside its pages are locks of hair, fingernails: a catalogue of victims. Horrified, Rea turns to the only person she can think of: DI Jack Lennon.