Showing results by narrator "Aoife McMahon" in All Categories

A retelling of the favourite Irish fairytale, The Children of Lir. Aífe marries Lir, a chieftain with four children by his previous wife. Jealous of his affection for his children, the witch Aífe turns them into swans for 900 years. Retold through the voice of Aífe, Savage Her Reply is unsettling and dark, feminist and fierce, yet nuanced in its exploration of the guilt of a complex character.

Set in rural Ireland in the early 1960s, House of Memories concludes the story of two neighbouring farms and their feuding families. Following his brutish father's death, young Danny Conway strives to rescue the family farm from ruin. When all seems hopeless, help comes from the most unexpected quarter. A story of grief and trying to cope with loss but also of resilience in the face of family tragedy. No one knows the minutiae of country life as Alice Taylor does, and again she displays her unique ability to capture its rhythms and cadences.

When Tara Ryan gets the results of a DNA test one rainy afternoon, all her dreams come true. She discovers she's not an only child, she has a long-lost sister, Cassie. What she doesn't know is that Cassie is homeless, strung out, and praying for a break. As socially awkward Tara lets street-wise Cassie into her life, shocking secrets come to the surface-a dark web of illegal adoptions, betrayal and death. All rooted in a horrifying children's home scandal which occurred many years before.

After months of training, former Long Island homicide detective Maggie D'arcy is now officially a Garda. She's finally settling into life in Ireland, and so is her teenage daughter, Lilly. Maggie may not be a detective yet, but she's happy with her community policing assignment in Dublin's Portobello neighborhood.

Jessica and Jane have been living together for six months and are devoted friends - or are they? Jessica loves her friend with the cruelty of total possessiveness; Jane is rich, silly, and drinks rather too many brandy-and-sodas. Watching from the sidelines, their friend Sylvester regrets that Jane should be 'loved and bullied and perhaps even murdered by that frightful Jessica', but decides it's none of his business. When the Irish gentleman George Playfair meets Jane, however, he thinks otherwise and entices her to Ireland where the battle for her devotion begins.

When Marianne’s carefully constructed life and marriage fall apart, she is forced to return to Ancaire, the ramshackle seaside house perched high on a cliff by the Irish Sea. There she must rebuild her relationship with her mother, Rita, a flamboyant artist and recovering alcoholic who lives by her own rules. Marianne left home when she was 15 following a traumatic and tragic incident. She never planned to return, and now she has to face the fact that some plans don’t work out the way you wanted them to.

It’s 1849 on the west coast of Ireland. Resilient Honora O’Donoghue is accustomed to fending for herself and to reading the language of the natural world. It was always said she’d been marked for something different, but it’s not until she suffers devastating losses in a country gripped by the Famine that Honora begins to understand how that difference will save her. With the hope of a better life in America calling, Honora keeps moving toward her freedom.

When Lady Anderson invites five guests to her apartment in Bruton Square, Mayfair, none of the guests know why they have been summoned. And it isn't long before dinner turns deadly. The mystery of Bruton Square has never been solved. On that infamous night in 1977, six strangers were invited for dinner at Lady Sybil Anderson's Mayfair apartment. Only five made it out alive. Welcome to Supper for Six, the true crime podcast. I'm your host, Felix. Together, we'll uncover what really happened that night... Let's dig in.

Lady Charlotte French-McGrath has successfully ruled over her family with a rod of iron until the arrival of Cynthia: beautiful, young, talented, selfish - and engaged to her son, Desmond. When Cynthia enters the Jazz Age, on the surface her life passes in a whirl of hunting, drinking and romance. But the ghosts of Garonlea are only biding their time: they know the source of their power, a secret handed on from one generation to the next.

Mental health has become the principal concern as adolescents struggle with a host of issues. This book provides psychotherapists with a clear theoretical understanding and practical application for navigating the increasingly complex adolescent experience as young people adjust and respond to the present day world.

In 1914, when Nicandra is eight, all is well in the grand Irish estate, Deer Forest. Maman is beautiful and adored. Dada, silent and small, mooches contentedly around the stables. Aunt Tossie, of the giant heart and bosom, is widowed but looks splendid in weeds. The butler, the groom, the land-steward, the maids, the men - each as a place and knows it. Then, astonishingly, the perfect surface is shattered; Maman does something too dreadful ever to be spoken of.

Hare's Landing, West Cork. A house full of mystery.... Rachel Lambert leaves London afraid for her personal safety and determined to uncover the truth behind the sudden death of a homeless man with links to a country house hotel called Hare's Landing. New York-based crime reporter Caroline Kelly's career is threatened by a lawsuit, and she needs some thinking space away from her job. But almost as soon as she arrives, Hare's Landing begins to reveal its own stories - a 30-year-old missing-person's case and the mysterious death of the hotel's former owner.

On the verge of a marital breakup after the death of their stillborn son, a journalist, Omar Wilde, who is covering the Centenary Bloomsday celebrations of James Joyce’s Ulysses in Dublin, Ireland, is desperately looking for "the story" that will prove his worth to his disillusioned wife, Flora. While wandering around the Bloomsday celebrations, they find themselves embroiled in a potential terrorist attack. Faced with this life-threatening situation, Omar must finally conquer his fears and sense of failure before hundreds of people, including many dignitaries, are murdered horribly.

Leah is in love. It should be the happiest summer of her life, but she can't help feeling lonely with Jake's attention divided between her, his ex-wife and his young son. As insomnia sets in, the walls of their new basement flat feel as if they're closing in around her. Until she meets her upstairs neighbour, Anton, who has recently moved back in after a long absence from the street. He's a sympathetic ear when Jake can't be, and even though others on the street seem strangely hostile towards him, Leah soon comes to rely on Anton and their secret conversations in the night.

Greta Cahill never believed she would leave her village in west Ireland, until she found herself on a ship bound for New York, with her sister, Johanna, and a boy named Michael Ward, a son of itinerant tinsmiths. Despite her family's cynicism, Greta discovers that in America she can fall in love, earn a living and build a life. She longs to return to show her family what she has made of herself, but at risk of revealing a secret about her past to her children, decides to keep her new life separate, torn from the people she is closest to.

At Mossgrove, the Phelan family farm, longtime hired hand Jack plays peacemaker as widow Martha Phelan battles her young son, Peter, who wants to modernise the farm. Tensions on the home front are bitter enough, but at the Conway farm across the river, more trouble is brewing. Slovenly Matt Conway feels trapped and abuses his wife, Biddy. Spurred on by a misguided belief that the Phelans got the best of him in a loan to buy land, he keeps vigil at a fence post plotting revenge....

After the annoying baby twins demolish the fort Cass has built in the sitting room, she has the great idea of building a proper fort outdoors that can be the Bubble Street Gang's clubhouse. Lex's granny suggests the perfect spot at the back of Mr McCall's field and Cass and the gang get to work. The gang settle in quickly and begin planning their next adventure, when they realise someone is using the clubhouse when they're not there. Stuff moves around, cookie crumbs are left behind and the door is left open. Join Cass and the Bubble Street Gang as they investigate The Clubhouse Mystery.

Sandy Shortt has been obsessed about where missing things and people end up ever since the disappearance of a childhood friend 20 years ago. It has even motivated her to become a private investigator, attempting to track down missing loved ones and giving devastated families hope. So when she finds herself one of the missing, stuck in a strange place with people who vanished into thin air years ago, she wonders if she has found the answer to one of life's greatest mysteries.

On a boat offshore, a fisherman guts a mackerel as he anxiously awaits a midnight rendezvous. Villagers, one by one, disappear into a sinkhole beneath a yew tree. A nameless girl is taped, bound and put on display in a countryside market. A dazzling and disquieting collection of stories, How to Gut a Fish places the bizarre beside the everyday and then elegantly and expertly blurs the lines. Sheila Armstrong’s exquisitely provocative stories carve their way into your mind and take hold.

An exclusive short story for World Book Day from one of our best-selling authors.... Sometimes all we need is a relaxing holiday in the sun. For Anthony and Carole, a week in a lovely Greek hotel has helped them mend the cracks in their marriage. For widowed Jessica, it’s the longest she’s ever gone without visiting her beloved husband’s grave. However when the flight doesn’t go according to plan, they are each forced to face up to the very things they have been avoiding for so long.