Search results for ""author dermot bolger""

An intimate human study and subtle portrait of a country in flux from New Island author Dermot Bolger. While a floundering Irish government clings to its illusion of power as an international troika waits in the wings, Martin, a mid-ranking civil servant, finds himself alone in a Beijing hotel: a superfluous accessory in a delegation accompanying a Minister to China. A cat-and-mouse encounter with a Chinese masseuse draws Martin into a world beyond his experience, forcing him to confront the gap between the chameleon face of someone at work and the reality when everything is stripped bare, with nowhere left to hide from the anxieties, longings and contradictions in his head. The Fall of Ireland is a subtle meditation on the thin line between illusion and actuality: a study of a homesick man in the gilded cage of a luxury hotel, trying to unravel which elements of his life are real and which are subconscious deceptions.

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A widow spends weeks haunting a cemetery, desperate to track down an unknown woman who keeps leaving flowers on her husband’s grave; A daughter searches a foreign city for her father, trying to understand why he disappeared forty-five years ago; A former gay lover of Roger Casement stands among the crowds at his state funeral in 1965, paying silent homage to the closeted world they were forced to inhabit at the dawning of the Irish State. A writer at a book launch comes face to face with the person secretly responsible for his success. In his first collection of short stories, Dermot Bolger peers under the veneer of our lives, exploring the secrets that bind families together, or tear them apart, creating worlds where people find that nothing is truly certain. There are always truths just beyond reach that would make sense of their lives, if they only know how to unlock them.

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A literary thriller with a heart. ‘The Valparaiso Voyage’ blows the lid off the Celtic Tiger and looks at the corruption that spawned today’s Ireland. Dermot Bolger is one of the leading figures on the Irish literary scene: very influential, amazingly energetic and prolific, popular and well respected. This is his eighth novel (and his third for Flamingo). Bolger’s previous novel, ‘Temptation’, was a departure for this author. It was a story of family life, told from a woman’s perspective. ‘The Valparaiso Voyage’ is, as you might say, Bolger returning to familiar territory – back to chronicling the darker side of contemporary Dublin life. It is the story of Brendan Brogan, who grew up in the small town of Navan on the outskirts of Dublin. An unhappy childhood, spent searching for love and affection, leads to an unhappy adulthood spent gambling and trying to hold a difficult marriage together. When circumstances offer Brogan a chance to fake his own death, he seizes the chance and runs – far away to Portugal where a new life beckons. But no one can escape the past entirely, and when his father is found murdered, Brogan returns to Dublin. Here he finds a new Ireland, wracked with corruption, everyone – politicians, bankers, businessmen, councillors – caught up in it, including his own father. Tormented by memories and old resentments, Brogan nevertheless feels he must solve the riddle of his father’s death. And he finds himself not in the least surprised to discover that the rot set in many years ago, back in the Navan of his childhood. A cracking, fast-paced literary thriller.

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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 O’Faolain on a bicycle on Brooklyn Bridge; Grace Gifford Plunkett, defiant in her lonely final years; Herbert Simms, Dublin’s brilliant, tragically overworked housing architect; and Patricia Lynch, writing The Turf-Cutter’s 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.

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'Myles Foley gripped my soaked jumper. Before his ship sank he was a Nazi: now he's 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 father's ship is sunk on this same route, Jack must go to sea to support his family swapping Wexford's small streets for Lisbon's 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. Bolger's new novel is based on a real-life rescue in 1943, when the Kerlogue's crew risked their lives to save 168 drowning German sailors - members of the navy that had killed Jack's 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 Bolger's most spellbinding novel, and the work of a master storyteller who is one of Ireland's best-known novelists, playwrights and poets.

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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 Bolger’s 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.

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