DERMOT BOLGER

Phone the cops or phone Alice. But just dont expect life to ever be the same after you make that call... When two neighbouring Dublin couples decide to cooperate in building a townhouse that straddles both of their gardens, they have no idea that the journey they embark on will expose the faultlines within their relationships and result in a panicked decision one night when the two husbands, Chris and Ronan, are confronted by a moral dilemma. The consequences of their actions cast these law-abiding men adrift into unknown territory, propelled into a new moral landscape where it seems impossible to turn back. Written by a master story-teller, Tanglewood grows into an incisive dissection of Ireland in 2007, when although these characters are unaware of it the Celtic Tiger edifice is quietly imploding. It is bitter-sweet examination of the simmering tensions, intolerable strains and unbreakable bonds of memory and love that can simultaneously exist within marriage.

Every night during a year spent in lockdown, Dermot Bolger set out on long walks through deserted streets, armed only with a pen and paper. Bolger follows in the footsteps of the great Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa, using walks through his native city to allow his imagination free rein to revisit pivotal moments in his own life and speculatively meditate on the lives of others in a series of remarkable poems.The book starts with his parents honeymooning in a wartime Wicklow orchard and ends, eight decades later, as the poet dances with his partner in a Wicklow field. In between we encounter Nuala OFaolain on a bicycle on Brooklyn Bridge; Grace Gifford Plunkett, defiant in her lonely final years; Herbert Simms, Dublins brilliant, tragically overworked housing architect; and Patricia Lynch, writing The Turf-Cutters Donkey in one room while her husband wrote communist tracts in the next. Interlaced with such real lives are imagined ones a hardened criminal detailing prison life in haikus, a doppelganger exploring alternative pasts for the author. Taken together, these poems chart a dazzling constellation of experiences.

Myles Foley gripped my soaked jumper. Before his ship sank he was a Nazi: now hes a drowning sailor. Out here, we are all sailors. Your father and grandfather understood that. Are you going to disgrace their memory?Part historical fiction, part extraordinary coming-of-age tale, The Lonely Sea and Sky charts the maiden voyage of fourteen-year-old Jack Roche aboard a tiny Wexford ship, the Kerlogue, on a treacherous wartime journey to Portugal. After his fathers ship is sunk on this same route, Jack must go to sea to support his family swapping Wexfords small streets for Lisbons vibrant boulevards: where every foreigner seems to be a refugee or a spy, and where he falls under the spell of Katerina, a Czech girl surviving on her wits. Bolgers new novel is based on a real-life rescue in 1943, when the Kerlogues crew risked their lives to save 168 drowning German sailors - members of the navy that had killed Jacks father. Forced to choose who to save and who to leave behind, the Kerlogue grows so dangerously overloaded that no one knows if they will survive amid the massive Biscay waves. A brilliant portrayal of those unarmed Irish ships that sailed alone through hazardous waters; of young romance and a boy encountering a world where every experience is intense and dangerous, this is Bolgers most spellbinding novel, and the work of a master storyteller who is one of Irelands best-known novelists, playwrights and poets.

Following a car crash, for several seconds Dublin photographer Sean Blake is clinically dead but finds his progress towards the afterworld blocked by a haunting face he only partially recognises. Restored to a miraculous second chance at life he feels profoundly changed. He is haunted by not knowing who he truly is because this is not the first time he has been given a second life. At six weeks old he was taken from his birth mother, a young girl forced to give him up for adoption. Now he knows that until he unlocks the truth about his origins, he will be a stranger to his wife, to his children and to himself.Struggling against a wall of official silence and a complex sense of guilt, Sean determines to find his birth mother, embarking on an absorbing journey into archives, memories, dreams and startling confessions.The first modern novel to address the scandal of Irish Magdalene laundries when it was published in 1994, A Second Life continued to haunt Bolgers imagination. He has never allowed its republication until he felt ready to retell the story in a new and even more compelling way. This reimagined text is therefore neither an old novel nor a new one, but a completely renewed novel, that grows towards a spelling-binding, profoundly moving conclusion.

Hidden behind the walls of Grangegorman Mental Hospital in 1941, four lives collide, all afflicted by the human cost of wars, betrayals and trauma.Gus, a shrewd attendant, is the keeper of everyones secrets, especially his own. Two War of Independence veterans are reunited. One, Jimmy Nolan, has spent twenty years as a psychiatric patient, unable to recover from his involvement in youthful killings. In contrast, Francis Dillon has prospered as a businessman, until rumours of Civil War atrocities cause his collapse, suffering delusions of enemies seeking to kill him.Doctor Fairfax has fled London after his gay lovers death. Desperate to rekindle a sense of purpose, Fairfax tries to help Dillon recover by getting him to talk about his past. But a code of silence surrounds the traumatic violence Ireland has endured. Is Dillon willing to break his silence to find a way back to his family?In this superb evocation of hidden worlds, master storyteller Dermot Bolger explores the aftershock within people who participate in violence and the fault-lines in all post-conflict societies only held together by collective amnesia.

Sete escritores, sete quartos de hotel, sete histórias que se encontram e desencontram... Editado e concebido por Dermot Bolger e escrito por sete dos mais prestigiados romancistas irlandeses, Hotel Finbar constroi uma extraordinaria trama de ficço pulsante de humor, vitalidade e suspense. Um instantaneo unico e frequentemente hilariante da melhor escrita que se produz actualmente na Irlanda.

Over the past 20 years, an explosion of contemporary Irish writing has forced its way onto the literary scene. This book contains Irish fiction published since 1968, arranged in the chronological order of the period in which the work is set.

Life moves forward, but its meaning often emerges in hindsight. In this luminous collection, Dermot Bolger captures those unexpected moments when past loves and choices resurface with startling clarity. These stories explore ageing, memory, and the lingering imprint of first encounters - how joy, loss, and betrayal echo across decades. A man searches for a secret half-sister to understand his father. A woman is haunted by a boys death fifty years ago. A lighthouse keeper recalls his first love. A public figure, slipping into dementia, relives one fateful night. From childhood holidays shadowed by tragedy to chance reunions that rewrite old narratives, Bolgers characters wrestle with Yeatss rag and bone shop of the heart, revealing the fragile beauty of human connection.