In The Fields of Athenry , James Charles Roy leads us through the Irish past and present with the central theme of his own personal experience with the renovation of a run-down castle -- really a crumbled tower -- that he purchased more than thirty years ago. Moyode Castle, located near the County Galway market town of Athenry, was built in the sixteenth century by the Dolphins, an Irish-speaking family directly descended from French-speaking Norman adventurers who had invaded Ireland four centuries earlier. This old tower house and the rich agricultural lands it guards has witnessed every strand of Irish history, from the heroic exploits of Celtic warriors long celebrated by Yeats and Lady Gregory, through the Easter Rising of 1916 when IRA insurgents used the building as a lookout. It stands today as a powerful, timeless symbol of the tumultuous ebb and flow of fortune, both good and bad, that characterizes Irish history. Roy weaves his personal story of the purchase and renovation of Moyode into a wide ranging historical conversation, leading us to a topic of real interest to Ireland today and our sense of history more broadly: the historical nostalgia we attach to Ireland and the fact that our romantic image flies directly in the face of development and boom times in the "Celtic Tiger" of the twenty-first century. Few know, for example, that today Ireland produces and ships more software abroad than any other country in the world with the exception of the United States, though we all know the story of Angela's Ashes. With this theme in mind, Roy leads us to question what attracts us -- or perhaps more aptly him -- to the rubble of a castle from Irish days long past.

A warm and funny debut novel about a young man in trouble and a family in love and in pieces. It's the first summer of lust for 14-year-old Jim Finnegan, a boy trying to become a man in 1980s Dublin. Jim's vivid and winning voice leaps off the page and into the reader's heart as he watches his parents argue, his five older sisters fight, and the local network of mothers gossip. Jim hilariously recounts his life dealing with the politics of his boisterous family, taking breakneck bike rides with his best friend, dancing to Foreigner on his boombox, and quietly coveting the local girls from afar. Over the summer, Jim wins the attention of a beautiful older girl, but he also becomes the unwilling target of a devious religious figure in the community. His life starts to unravel as he faces consequences from both his love for his girlfriend and his attempts to avoid the Parish Priest. When he and his girlfriend take a ferry for a clandestine trip to London, the dark and difficult repercussions from the trip force Jim to look for the solution to all his problems in some very unusual places. The Fields is an unforgettable story of an extraordinary character. It's a portrait of a boy who sinks into troubles as he grows into a man, and the loving but fractured family that might be his downfall -- or his salvation. Lyrical, funny, and endlessly inventive, it is a brilliant debut from a remarkable new voice.

Focus: Irish Traditional Music, Second Edition introduces the instrumental and vocal musics of Ireland, its diaspora in North America, and its Celtic neighbors while exploring the essential values underlying these rich musical cultures and placing them in broader historical and social context. With both the undergraduate and graduate student in mind, the text weaves together past and present, bringing together important ideas about Irish music from a variety of sources and presenting them, in three parts, within interdisciplinary lenses of history, film, politics, poetry, and art: I. Irish Music in Place and Time provides an overview of the island’s musical history and its relationship to current performance practice. II. Music Traditions Abroad and at Home contrasts the instrumental and vocal musics of the "Celtic Nations" (Scotland, Wales, Brittany, etc.) and the United States with those of Ireland. III. Focusing In: Vocal Music in Irish-Gaelic and English identifies the great songs of Ireland’s two main languages and explores the globalization of Irish music. New to this edition are discussions of those contemporary issues reflective of Ireland’s dramatic political and cultural shifts in the decade since first publication, issues concerning equity and inclusion, white nationalism, the Irish Traveller community, hip hop and punk, and more. Pedagogical features—such as discussion questions, a glossary, a timeline of key dates, and expanded references, as well as an online soundtrack—ensure that readers of Focus: Irish Traditional Music, Second Edition will be able to grasp Ireland's important social and cultural contexts and apply that understanding to traditional and contemporary vocal and instrumental music today.

'A joy to read: fresh, funny, moving and always surprising' Kate Atkinson 'Fresh, beguiling and laugh-out-loud funny on every page, this must be the most enjoyable Irish novel since Skippy Dies' Guardian They'd sit around in a steamy kitchen circle like four mad witches, and dip ginger-snaps into Maxwell House until they went wobbly-warm, and take turns at saying, Jahear about so-and-so, Lord rest his soul, only thirty years old, poor creature?! They were brilliant at it. Scaring the shite out of each other, grinning inside. Jim Finnegan is thirteen years old and life in his world consists of dealing with the helter-skelter intensity of his rumbustious family, taking breakneck bike rides with his best friend, and coveting the local girls from afar - until one day when everything changes. The Fields is an unforgettable story of an extraordinary character: Jim's voice leaps off the page and straight into the reader's heart as he grapples with his unfairly interrupted adolescence. Praise for The Fields: 'Heartbreaking and hilarious in equal measures' Stylist Funny and heart-warming' Daily Mail 'The Fields is crazy mad, lyrical and unforgettable' Red 'Exquisite moments of comedy that anyone with a whiff of Irish heritage will immediately recognise' Sunday Express

Read an essay by Chang-rae Lee here. The bestselling, award-winning writer of Native Speaker, Aloft, and My Year Abroad returns with his biggest, most ambitious novel yet: a spellbinding story of how love and war echo through an entire lifetime. With his three critically acclaimed novels, Chang-rae Lee has established himself as one of the most talented writers of contemporary literary fiction. Now, with The Surrendered, Lee has created a book that amplifies everything we've seen in his previous works, and reads like nothing else. It is a brilliant, haunting, heartbreaking story about how love and war inalterably change the lives of those they touch. June Han was only a girl when the Korean War left her orphaned; Hector Brennan was a young GI who fled the petty tragedies of his small town to serve his country. When the war ended, their lives collided at a Korean orphanage where they vied for the attentions of Sylvie Tanner, the beautiful yet deeply damaged missionary wife whose elusive love seemed to transform everything. Thirty years later and on the other side of the world, June and Hector are reunited in a plot that will force them to come to terms with the mysterious secrets of their past, and the shocking acts of love and violence that bind them together. As Lee unfurls the stunning story of June, Hector, and Sylvie, he weaves a profound meditation on the nature of heroism and sacrifice, the power of love, and the possibilities for mercy, salvation, and surrendering oneself to another. Combining the complex themes of identity and belonging of Native Speaker and A Gesture Life with the broad range, energy, and pure storytelling gifts of Aloft, Chang-rae Lee has delivered his most ambitious, exciting, and unforgettable work yet. It is a mesmeriz­ing novel, elegantly suspenseful and deeply affecting.

Music and Irish Identity represents the latest stage in a life-long project for Gerry Smyth, focusing here on the ways in which music engages with particular aspects of Irish identity. The nature of popular music and the Irish identity it supposedly articulates have both undergone profound change in recent years: the first as a result of technological and wider industrial changes in the organisation and dissemination of music as seen, for example, with digital platforms such as YouTube, Spotify and iTunes. A second factor has been Ireland’s spectacular fall from economic grace after the demise of the "Celtic Tiger", and the ensuing crisis of national identity. Smyth argues that if, as the stereotypical association would have it, the Irish have always been a musical race, then that association needs re-examination in the light of developments in relation to both cultural practice and political identity. This book contributes to that process through a series of related case studies that are both scholarly and accessible. Some of the principal ideas broached in the text include the (re-)establishment of music as a key object of Irish cultural studies; the theoretical limitations of traditional musicology; the development of new methodologies specifically designed to address the demands of Irish music in all its aspects; and the impact of economic austerity on musical negotiations of Irish identity. The book will be of seminal importance to all those interested in popular music, cultural studies and the wider fate of Ireland in the twenty-first century.

Author Steve Marsh has spent many years playing guitar in the folk clubs of the United Kingdom where Irish music is in abundance. This collection draws from his extensive collection of original arrangements of traditional tunes. the songs vary in style and can be grouped into sets for use in a recital program. Many of the folk songs have been handed down from generation to generation so several versions of a song may exist. Therefore, the author has taken a few liberties with the tempo and rhythmic structures of a limited number of tunes in this collection. In general, the pieces in this album range from moderate standard to difficult. In standard notation only.

'Clutching in my hand my seven copper pennies, I ran down the two flights of stone stairs from our tenement flat and through the East End to Kinloch Street, where, puffing a bit, I joined the queue of other wee boys lining up to place their coins on the brass plate above the iron turnstile, push hard against it, then climb up onto the dirt terracing and into Paradise. The rest of the world called it Celtic Park.' This is a story seen through green-and-white spectacles. It begins when nine-year-old Glaswegian John Cairney walks through the boys' gate at Celtic Park and embarks on a series of adventures that, over the years, take him all over Scotland and beyond. The Sevenpenny Gate is about a search for heroes, Celtic heroes. It is also the tale of an East End club of humble Irish origins that has developed into a worldwide brand and continues to command the devotion of its fans, even with the Celtic diaspora now spread across the globe.

Spanning the decades that saw Northern Ireland move from brutal conflict to uncertain peace in the 1990s, this powerful new take on the literature of the Troubles is both a political coming-of-age novel and a fast-paced literary thriller. Aoife, a young girl growing up in 1980s Belfast, finds herself the last line of defense between the violence and her family. While her mother sinks deeper into a medicated stupor, and her father leaves the family for the comforts of the local bars, Aoife cares for her brother Damien, trying to keep him out of harm's way, while all around her friends and neighbors are swept up in the conflict. Meanwhile Cassie, a Republican paramilitary and honey trap, lures and seduces her victims, inflicting lasting damage. But her infamous tactics have their repercussions, and before long her past catches up with her.

Celtic Football Club has a huge support in Ireland, many of whom regularly travel to watch their team in Glasgow or follow them on TV. Now, "Celtic FC - The Ireland Connection" explores the deep-rooted links between Celtic Football Club, Ireland and the 90 million supporters of Irish descent throughout the world - links which include the club's founder Brother Walfrid from Sligo; the first sod of turf on Celtic Park in 1892 from Donegal; why the Irish flag flies over the stadium; Celtic's first manager, Willie Maley from Newry; emigration from Ireland to Scotland; and, the many Irish players and staff who have played or managed at Celtic. This is a fascinating, must-read book for supporters of Celtic Football Club in Ireland, Scotland and around the world.