Bøker av Dermot Bolger

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 everyone's 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 lover's 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.

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 ΓÇô 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 BolgerΓÇÖs 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 ΓÇÿrenewedΓÇÖ novel, that grows towards a spelling-binding, profoundly moving conclusion.

'Each story stands alone but also makes up the vivid picture of life in Dublin's newly refurbished Finbar's Hotel . . . funny and poignant' Sunday Mirror 'Finbar's Hotel is back, this time with a stellar cast of women writers and a lick of paint . . . But what's it all about? Well, it would be all too easy to give the game away, so let's just say that there's a hilarious reworking of the old immaculate conception theme, a bittersweet confrontation between a daughter and her loopy father, a poignant encounter involving a long-married couple, and a cracking finish . . . it doesn't matter who wrote what: together they've produced a playful, light, highly entertaining book' Irish Times 'Beneath the humour, whimsy and outright craziness, Ladies' Night at Finbar's Hotel hits at the shallowness of current social pretensions and offers a cautious optimism about women's lives today' Times Literary Supplement

'The Journey Home' is the story of a young boy's struggle towards maturity, set against a shocking portrait of Ireland: a tough urban landscape, not a rural Eden.Francis Hanrahan, the shy child of grey suburban streets, is Francy at home to his country-born parents. But when he meets Shay, an older, wilder image of himself, he becomes Hano, and is cast out into the night-time world of Dublin - a world of drugs, all-night drinking sessions in bars and snooker halls, and the stench of political corruption.

A stunning historical saga set in the early decades of the twentieth century which follows the lives and loves of one extraordinary family.We first meet the Goold Verschoyle children in 1915. Though there is a war going on in the world outside, they seem hardly touched by it - midnight swims, flower fairies and regatta parties form the backdrop to their enchanted childhood. But as they grow older, changes within Ireland and the wider world encroach upon the family's private paradise.Turbulent times - the Irish war of independence, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II - are woven into the tapestry upon which this magical story is spun. Events in Spain, Russia and London draw the children in different directions: one travels to Moscow to witness Communism at first had; another runs away to England to take part in the General Strike and then heads off to the Civil War in Spain; another follows the more conventional route of marriage and family.Based upon the extraordinary lives of a real-life Anglo-Irish family, Bolger's novel superbly recreates a family in flux, driven by idealism, wracked by argument and united by love and the vivid memories of childhood. 'The Family on Paradise Pier' shows Bolger at the height of his powers as a master storyteller. A spellbinding and magnificent achievement.

From one of Ireland's bestselling writers, a literary thriller set in London and Dublin.A combination of family fable and gripping thriller, 'Father's Music' tells the story of Tracey, the troubled twenty-two-year-old daughter of an Englishwoman and a wandering musician from Donegal. She knows very little about her father, who returned to Ireland before Tracey was born, but when she is taken to Ireland by her lover, a Dublin businessman with underworld connections, Tracey at last feels she is coming home - to her father's land.Caught up in Dublin low-life, tormented by memories of her dead mother and eager to follow up news of her father, Tracey finds her journey home to be a dangerous and extraordinary one...

A bawdy, vibrant and tumultuous adaptation of James Joyce's classic.It's Ulysses as you've never imagined it before, a superbly theatrical homage to Joyce's chronicle of Dublin life and the greatest novel of all time.

An ordinary man is forced to confront both his own demons and the manifestation of the supernatural beyond his comprehension and control

This is the first collection of the plays of Dermot Bolger, seen as at the cutting edge of Irish writing as a playwright, novelist, poet and editor.