Paths of Glory by Jeffrey Archer - South Dublin Libraries

14 Pages·2012·0.67 MB·English

Paths of Glory by Jeffrey Archer
Paths of Glory tells the story of George Mallory, the famed
mountaineer who disappeared while attempting to climb
Mount Everest in 1924.

Persuasion by Jane Austen
At twenty-seven, Anne Elliot is no longer young and has
few romantic prospects. Eight years earlier, she had been
persuaded by her friend Lady Russell to break off her
engagement to Frederick Wentworth, a handsome naval
captain with neither fortune nor rank. What happens when
they encounter each other again is movingly told in Jane
Austen's last completed novel. Set in the fashionable
societies of Lyme Regis and Bath, Persuasion is a brilliant
satire of vanity and pretension, but, above all, it is a love
story tinged with the heartache of missed opportunities.

Annie Dunne by Sebastian Barry
This moving story is narrated by the eponymous Annie
Dunne, who, in her 60s, has come to live with her cousin
Sarah on an impoverished farm in County Wicklow. Plain
and poor, and afflicted with a humpback since a childhood
attack of polio, Annie is grateful to Sarah for taking her in.
But when a scheming handyman on a neighboring farm
begins to court Sarah, Annie sees her livelihood
threatened and fights back with the only weapons in her
arsenal: bitterness and rage. Complicating the events of
the summer spanned by the plot are the two young
children left in Annie's care by her nephew, who's gone off
to London. This compassionate portrait of a distraught woman mourning the
years of promise and dreams that were "narrowed by the empty hand of
possibility" is a masterful feat of characterization, all the more vivid against the
backdrop of rural Ireland in the 1950s, undergoing changes that throw Annie's life
into sharper focus.
In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead by James Lee Burke
Hollywood has sent its emissaries to New Iberia Parish to
film a Civil War epic in the steaming mists of the Louisiana
bayou, reawakening the ghosts of a past best left
undisturbed. The restless specters wait in the shadows for
cajun cop Dave Robicheaux as he hunts a serial butcher
who is preying on the less-then-innocent young. For these
spirits are the guardians of Robicheaux's darkest torments
and they hold the key to his ultimate salvation, or a final,
fatal downfall.

Other People’s Money by Justin Cartwright
The venerable bank of Tubal & Co is in trouble. It's not the
first time in its three-hundred-year history - it was bailed
out by Rothschilds' in 1847 - but this time will be the last.
A sale is under way, and a number of rather important
facts need to be kept hidden, especially from any potential
buyer. Hundreds of millions of pounds are being diverted -
temporarily - to shore it up, masterminded by the bank's
chairman, Julian Trevelyan-Tubal.

Live Wire by Harlan Coben
Myron Bolitar has always dreamed about a voluptuous
femme fatale walking into his office and asking for help.
The woman standing in his doorway has killer curves, all
right: she's eight months pregnant, which kind of ruins the
fantasy. Over the years Myron has negotiated his share of
contracts for former tennis star Suzze T and her rock star
husband, Lex, but now Lex has disappeared and a very
pregnant Suzze is in tears, fearing the online rumours
questioning the baby's paternity have driven away the
man she swears is the child's father. For Myron, questions of fatherhood couldn't
hit closer to home, as his dad, Al, clings to life and the brother who abandoned
the family years ago resurfaces - with danger following close behind. Myron is
soon forced to confront deep secrets in Suzze's past, his family's mortality - and
his own.
All the Single Ladies by Jane Costello
Samantha Brooks' boyfriend has made a mistake. One his
friends, family, and Sam herself know he'll live to regret.
Jamie has announced he's leaving, out of the blue. Jamie
is loving, intelligent and, while he isn't perfect, he's perfect
for her - in every way except one: he's a free spirit. And
after six years in one place, doing a job he despises, he is
compelled to do something that will tear apart his
relationship with Sam: book a one-way flight to South
America. But Sam isn't giving up without a fight. With
Jamie still totally in love with her, and torn about whether
to stay or go, she has three months to persuade him to do
the right thing. So with the help of her friends Ellie and
Jen, she hatches a plan to make him realise what he's
giving up. A plan that involves dirty tricks, plotting, and a
single aim: to win him back. But by the time the tortured Jamie finally wakes up to
what he's lost, a gorgeous new pretender has entered Sam's life. Which begs the
question, does she still want him back?
Where No Storms Come by John F. Deane
This novel follows the lives of Patrick Brennan and
Dorothy Lohan. Destined for the religious life and from
different social backgrounds, they form an unlikely
friendship. A moving story of destiny and desire, the novel
follows the parallel trajectories of their lives through
childhood, adolescence, and into adulthood, charting their
struggles with the spiritual paths they have chosen. A
powerful, beautiful, and thought-provoking novel about
faith, doubt, and individual freedom.
The Woman Who Walked Into Doors by Roddy Doyle
‘My name is Paula Spencer. I am thirty-nine years old. It
was my birthday last week. I was married for eighteen
years. My husband died last year. He was shot by the
Guards. He left me a year before that. I threw him out. His
name was Charles Spencer; everyone called him Charlo.'
The Woman Who Walked Into Doors is one of Roddy
Doyle's finest achievement to date, the heart-rending story
of a woman struggling to reclaim her dignity after a violent,
abusive marriage and a worsening drink problem. Paula
Spencer recalls her contented childhood, the audacity she
learned as a teenager, the exhilaration of her romance
with Charlo, and the marriage to him that left her
powerless. Capturing both her vulnerability and her
strength, Doyle gives Paula a voice that is real and unforgettable. Lean, sexy,
funny and poignant, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors shows, yet again, that
Roddy Doyle has an unparalleled gift for transforming ordinary life into great
literature.
The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng
Malaya, 1949. After studying law at Cambrige and time
spent helping to prosecute Japanese war criminals, Yun
Ling Teoh, herself the scarred lone survivor of a brutal
Japanese wartime camp, seeks solace among the jungle
fringed plantations of Northern Malaya where she grew up
as a child. There she discovers Yugiri, the only Japanese
garden in Malaya, and its owner and creator, the
enigmatic Aritomo, exiled former gardener of the Emperor
of Japan. Despite her hatred of the Japanese, Yun Ling
seeks to engage Aritomo to create a garden in Kuala
Lumpur, in memory of her sister who died in the camp.
Aritomo refuses, but agrees to accept Yun Ling as his
apprentice until the monsoon comes. Then she can design
a garden for herself. As the months pass, Yun Ling finds herself intimately drawn
to her sensei and his art while, outside the garden, the threat of murder and
kidnapping from the guerrillas of the jungle hinterland increases with each
passing day. But the Garden of Evening Mists is also a place of mystery. Who is
Aritomo and how did he come to leave Japan? Why is it that Yun Ling’s friend
and host Magnus Praetorius, seems to almost immune from the depredations of
the Communists? What is the legend of Yamashitas Gold and does it have any
basis in fact? And is the real story of how Yun Ling managed to survive the war
perhaps the darkest secret of all?
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
The new novel from the bestselling author of Middlesex
and The Virgin Suicides. Brown University, 1982.
Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English student and incurable
romantic, is writing her thesis on Jane Austen and George
Eliot - authors of the great marriage plots. As Madeleine
studies the age-old motivations of the human heart, real
life, in the form of two very different men, intervenes.
Leonard Bankhead, brilliant scientist and charismatic
loner, attracts Madeleine with an intensity that she seems
powerless to resist. Meanwhile her old friend Mitchell
Grammaticus, a theology student searching for some kind
of truth in life, is certain of at least one thing - that he and
Madeleine are destined to be together. But as all three
leave college, they will have to figure out how they want their own marriage plot
to end.
Preventing the Future by Tom Garvin
Between the years of the mid thirties through to 1960,
independent Ireland suffered from economic stagnation,
and also went through a period of intense cultural and
psychological repression. While external circumstances
account for much of the stagnation - especially the
depression of the thirties and the Second World War -
Preventing the Future argues that the situation was
aggravated by internal circumstances. The key domestic
factor was the failure to extend higher and technical
education and training to larger sections of the population.
This derived from political stalemates in a small country
which derived in turn from the power of the Catholic
Church, the strength of the small-farm community, the
ideological wish to preserve an older society and, later, gerontocratic tendencies
in the political elites and in society as a whole. While economic growth did
accelerate after 1960, the political stand-off over mass education resulted in
large numbers of young people being denied preparation for life in the modern
world and, arguably, denied Ireland a sufficient supply of trained labour and
educated citizens. Ireland's Celtic Tiger of the nineties was in great part driven by
a new and highly educated and technically trained workforce. The political
stalemates of the forties and fifties delayed the initial, incomplete take-off until the
sixties and resulted in the Tiger arriving nearly a generation later than it might
have.
The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
In a poor, remote section of southern Mexico, the Red
Shirts have taken control, God has been outlawed, and
the priests have been systematically hunted down and
killed. Now, the last priest strives to overcome physical
and moral cowardice in order to find redemption.

Ulysses by James Joyce
Ulysses, one of the greatest novels of the twentieth
century, has had a profound influence on modern fiction.
In a series of episodes covering the course of a single
day, 16 June 1904, the novel traces the movements of
Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus through the streets
of Dublin. Each episode has its own literary style, and the
epic journey of Odysseus is only one of many
correspondencies that add layers of meaning to the text.
Ulysses has been the subject of controversy since copies
of the first English edition were burned by the New York
Post Office Authorities. Today critical interest centres on
the authority of the text, and this edition, complete with an
invaluable introduction, notes, and appendices,
republishes for the first time, without interference, the original 1922 text.
Click, Click by June Kavanagh

Joyce, June and Paula Kavanagh were three sisters born
to a family of ten in Ballyfermot, Dublin in the 1960s. Their
father abused all three of them in the family home
throughout their childhood. In 1989, the sisters made the
brave decision to bring charges against their father and, in
1990, the state took a successful case against him. He
was convicted and imprisoned. Click, Click is the story of
their abuse; the exposure of a man prolific in his
paedophilia; and an Irish childhood lost in a dysfunctional,
abusive and torturous environment. Importantly, however,
it is also the story of three women's healing; their coming
to terms with their abuse, and their forgiveness of
themselves and others. The Kavanagh sisters have
refused to allow their abuse to define them. With fierce humour, insight and
honesty, they now share their story and show that with love and determination,
you can indeed conquer all.

The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling
Imagine growing up among wolves, being friends with a
panther and a bear, and hunting the most fearsome
animal in the wild, the man-killing tiger Shere Khan.
Rudyard Kipling portrays the exciting and adventurous
jungle upbringing of Mowgli in this timeless classic. Still
amazingly contemporary even though it was written more
than 100 years ago, the pacing, language, and characters
will keep readers young and old turning the pages, and
then begging for more. Originally published in two
volumes, this edition collects all the Mowgli stories and
adds the very popular Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and Toomai of the
Elephants.

Various Pets Alive and Dead by Marina Lewycka
For twenty years Doro and Marcus lived in a commune,
convinced lentils and free love would change the world.
They didn't. What they did do was give their children a
terror of radicalism, dirt, cooking rotas and poverty. Their
daughter Clara wants nothing less conformist than her
own, clean bathroom. Their son Serge hides the awkward
fact that he's a banker earning loadsamoney. So when
Doro and Marcus spring a surprise on their kids - just as
the world is rocked in ways they always wished for - the
family is forced to confront some thorny truths about
themselves.

Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

Two old friends meet in the throng outside a crematorium
to pay their last respects to Molly Lane. Both Clive Linley
and Vernon Halliday had been Molly's lovers in the days
before they reached their current eminence, Clive as
Britain's most successful modern composer, Vernon as
editor of the quality broadsheet, ‘The Judge’. In the days
that follow Molly's funeral Clive and Vernon will make a
pact that will have consequences neither has foreseen.
Each will make a disastrous moral decision, their
friendship will be tested to its limits and Julian Garmony will be fighting for his
political life. A contemporary morality tale, profound and witty, this short novel is
perhaps the most purely enjoyable fiction Ian McEwan has ever written. And why
Amsterdam? What happens there to Clive and Vernon is the most delicious
shock in a novel brimming with surprises.
Even the Dogs by Jon McGregor
On a cold, quiet day between Christmas and the New
Year, a man's body is found in an abandoned apartment.
His friends look on, but they're dead, too. Their bodies
found in squats and sheds and alleyways across the city.
Victims of a bad batch of heroin, they're in the shadows, a
chorus keeping vigil as the hours pass, paying their own
particular homage as their friend's body is taken away,
examined, investigated, and cremated. All of their stories
are laid out piece by broken piece through a series of
fractured narratives. Even the Dogs is an intimate
exploration of life at the edges of society, littered with love,
loss, despair, and a half-glimpse of redemption.

Solace by Belinda McKeon
Mark Casey has left home, the rural Irish community
where his family has farmed the same land for
generations, to study for a doctorate in Dublin, a vibrant,
contemporary city full of possibility. To his father, Tom,
who needs help baling the hay and ploughing the fields,
Mark's pursuit isn't work at all, and indeed Mark finds
himself whiling away his time with pubs and parties. His is
a life without focus or responsibility, until he meets Joanne
Lynch, a trainee solicitor whom he finds irresistible.
Joanne too has a past to escape from and for a brief time
she and Mark share the chaos and rapture of a new love
affair, until the lightning strike of tragedy changes
everything. Solace is a work to be admired for its spare,
intense lyricism, its range, and its deeply compassionate
portrayal of life as it is lived now.
Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
'My boy Thomas, give him a dirty look and he'll gouge
your eye out. Trip him, and he'll cut off your leg,' says
Walter Cromwell in the year 1500. 'But if you don't cut
across him he's a very gentleman. And he'll stand anyone
a drink.' By 1535 Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith's son,
is far from his humble origins. Chief Minister to Henry VIII,
his fortunes have risen with those of Anne Boleyn, Henry's
second wife, for whose sake Henry has broken with Rome
and created his own church. But Henry's actions have
forced England into dangerous isolation, and Anne has
failed to do what she promised: bear a son to secure the
Tudor line. When Henry visits Wolf Hall, Cromwell
watches as Henry falls in love with the silent, plain Jane
Seymour. The minister sees what is at stake: not just the king's pleasure, but the
safety of the nation. As he eases a way through the sexual politics of the court,
its miasma of gossip, he must negotiate a 'truth' that will satisfy Henry and secure
his own career. But neither minister nor king will emerge undamaged from the
bloody theatre of Anne's final days.
The Song of Achilles by Madeleine Miller
Greece in the age of Heroes. Patroclus, an awkward
young prince, has been exiled to the kingdom of Phthia.
Here he is nobody, just another unwanted boy living in the
shadow of King Peleus and his golden son, Achilles.
Achilles takes the shamed prince under his wing and soon
their tentative companionship gives way to a steadfast
friendship. When word comes that Helen of Sparta has
been kidnapped, the men of Greece are called upon to lay
siege to Troy in her name. Seduced by the promise of a
glorious destiny, Achilles joins their cause, Torn between
love and fear for his friend, Patroclus follows Achilles into
war, little knowing that the years that follow will test
everything they have learned, everything they hold dear,
and that, before he is ready, he will be forced to surrender his friend to the hands
of Fate.
The Lighthouse by Alison Moore
The Lighthouse begins on a North Sea ferry, on whose
blustery outer deck stands Futh, a middle-aged, recently
separated man heading to Germany for a restorative
walking holiday.Spending his first night in Hellhaus at a
small, family-run hotel, he finds the landlady hospitable
but is troubled by an encounter with an inexplicably hostile
barman.In the morning, Futh puts the episode behind him
and sets out on his week-long circular walk along the
Rhine. As he travels, he contemplates his childhood; a
complicated friendship with the son of a lonely neighbour;
his parents' broken marriage and his own. But the story he
keeps coming back to, the person and the event affecting
all others, is his mother and her abandonment of him as a
boy, which left him with a void to fill, a substitute to find.He recalls his first trip to
Germany with his newly single father. He is mindful of something he neglected to
do there, an omission which threatens to have devastating repercussions for him
this time around.At the end of the week, Futh, sunburnt and blistered, comes to
the end of his circular walk, returning to what he sees as the sanctuary of the
Hellhaus hotel, unaware of the events which have been unfolding there in his
absence.
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne by Brian Moore

A timeless classic dealing with the complexity and
hardships of relationships, addiction and faith. Judith
Hearne, a Catholic middle-aged spinster, moves into yet
another bed-sit in Belfast. A socially isolated woman of
modest means, she teaches piano to a handful of students
to pass the day. Her only social activity is tea with the
O'Neill family, who secretly dread her weekly visits.
Judith soon meets wealthy James Madden and fantasises
about marrying this lively, debonair man. But Madden
sees her in an entirely different light, as a potential
investor in a business proposal. On realising that her
feelings are not reciprocated, she turns to an old addiction
– alcohol. Having confessed her problems to an indifferent
priest, she soon loses her faith and binges further. She wonders what place there
is for her in a world that so values family ties and faith, both of which she is
without.