Jack the B.

An Irish Country Love Story is the eleventh heartwarming installment in New York Times and Globe and Mail bestselling author Patrick Taylor's beloved Irish Country series. It’s the winter of 1967 and snow is on the ground in the colorful Irish village of Ballybucklebo, but the chilly weather can’t stop love from warming hearts all over the county. Not just the love between a man and woman, as with young doctor, Barry Laverty, and his fiancee Sue Nolan, who are making plans to start a new life together, but also the love of an ailing pensioner for a faithful dog that's gone missing, the love of the local gentry for the great estate they are on verge of losing, or Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly’s deep and abiding love for his long-time home and practice. For decades, ever since the war, Number One Main Street, Ballybucklebo, has housed O’Reilly and his practice. In recent years, it has also opened its doors to O’Reilly’s wife, Barry Laverty, and a new addition to the practice, Doctor Nonie Stevens, a sultry and occasionally prickly young woman who may not be fitting in as well as she should. It is to Number One that patients young and old come when they need a doctor’s care, for everything from the measles to a rare and baffling blood disease. An unexpected turn of events threatens to drive O’Reilly from his home for good, unless the entire village can rally behind their doctor and prove that love really can conquer all. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Doctor O'Reilly experiences both love and loss during World War II in this new novel in Patrick Taylor's beloved Irish Country series Long before Dr. Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly came to the colourful Irish village of Ballybucklebo, young Surgeon-lieutenant O'Reilly answered the call of duty to serve in World War II. Fingal just wants to marry his beloved Deirdre and live happily ever after. First he must hone his skills at a British naval hospital before reporting back to the HMS Warspite, where, as a ship's doctor, he faces danger upon the high seas. With German bombers a constant threat, the future has never been more uncertain, but Fingal and Deirdre are determined to make a life together . . . no matter what may lie ahead. Decades later, the war is long over, and O'Reilly is content to mend the bodies and souls of his patients in Ballybucklebo, but there are still changes and challenges aplenty. A difficult pregnancy, as well as an old colleague badly in denial concerning his own serious medical condition, tests O'Reilly and his young partner, Barry Laverty. But even with all that occupies him in the present, can O'Reilly ever truly let go of the ghosts from his past? Shifting effortlessly between two singular eras, bestselling author Patrick Taylor continues the story of O'Reilly's wartime experiences, while vividly bringing the daily joys and struggles of Ballybucklebo to life once more.

From the early Gaels to Hugh Leonard, Irish people have been seducing, cajoling, stalking, obsessing, throwing jealous fits, begging marriage, urging adultery, mourning lost loves, plotting new loves, threatening to kill themselves, and addressing moving last words to loved ones before going to their deaths all through the medium of the written word. Straight from the Heart is both a beautiful gift book and a piece of fascinating social history. It comprises more than 60 love letters ranging in time from 1694 to 1998. Bridget Hourican's brilliant selection includes Yeats to Maud Gonne, correspondence between the tragic Francis Sheehy Skeffington and his wife Hannah as well as that between James Joyce and Nora Barnacle. Three of the 1916 leaders, Thomas McDonagh, Joseph M Plunkett and Eamonn Ceannt are here as well as Michael Collins, John Millington Synge and George Bernard Shaw. It even includes a love letter from Eamonn DeValera to his wife Sinead. Most touchingly we have a letter from Patrick Kavanagh to Hilda Moriarty, the beauty for whom he wrote Raglan Road. The book also includes some ordinary people - letters from the Front and from emigrants writing home to their sweethearts - and these are often as eloquent and heartbreaking as those written by the literati or historical giants as love can raise any man (or woman) to passion.

Together these poems mingle the famous, the infamous, and the unknown into a beautiful and striking anthology. Fraught simultaneously with both violence and love, this work spans four centuries of romance, up-to and including the most modern of poets such as Sara Berkeley and 1995 Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney. It includes romantic favorites, passionate nationalists, Celtic heroes, and modern revivalists. For some of these authors, it is their first appearance in a U.S. anthology. This welcome collection captures the passion of being Irish and in love, be it the love of a woman or man, country or countryside, or the love of a freedom which seems perpetually elusive.

Tales of passion and romance, love on the battlefield, affairs kept secret on pain of death ... From the bride who married in a prison cell, to the leader caught in a love triangle, to the revolutionaries who did their loving on the run, the romantic lives of Ireland's most famous characters have been predictably turbulent. Some Irish lovers have shocked a nation and brought down governments, some have produced the world's most beautiful poetry, some have reached across oceans – not to mention deep divisions at home – to find love. Marian Broderick views historical Irish romances through a contemporary lens, from the legendary lovers of prehistory to more modern convention-defying pioneers. The greatest Irish romances from history. With chapters on Inspirations, Love & War, Love Across the Divide, Secrets & Scandals and When Love Goes Wrong, among others, Marian Broderick tells of the men and women whose passions drove them to be together: often in the face of society, family, and even their own safety. From the legendary Deirdre and Naoise to WB Yeats and Maud Gonne, Charles Stuart Parnell and Katherine O'Shea to Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLiammóir, romantic Ireland is far from dead and gone!

An intimate, lyrical look at the ancient rite of the Irish wake--and the Irish way of overcoming our fear of death Death is a whisper for most of us. Instinctively we feel we should dim the lights, pull the curtains, and speak softly. But on a remote island off the coast of Ireland's County Mayo, death has a louder voice. Each day, along with reports of incoming Atlantic storms, the local radio runs a daily roll call of the recently departed. The islanders go in great numbers, young and old alike, to be with their dead. They keep vigil with the corpse and the bereaved company through the long hours of the night. They dig the grave with their own hands and carry the coffin on their own shoulders. The islanders cherish the dead--and amid the sorrow, they celebrate life, too. In My Father's Wake, acclaimed author and award-winning filmmaker Kevin Toolis unforgettably describes his own father's wake and explores the wider history and significance of this ancient and eternal Irish ritual. Perhaps we, too, can all find a better way to deal with our mortality--by living and loving as the Irish do.