An old loner and his misfit dog spend a year on the road in this acclaimed Irish novel of “singing prose [and] two unlikely Beckettian wanderers” (The Guardian, UK). It is springtime, and an isolated man shunned by his village has forged a connection with the one-eyed dog he’s taken into his tightly shuttered life. But as their friendship grows, their small seaside community becomes suspicious. And when an accident is misconstrued as menace, this pair of outcasts must take to the road. As they travel from town to town, sleeping in the car and subsisting on canned spaghetti, the man confides in One Eye the strange and melancholy story of his life. With its gorgeously poetic prose, Spill Simmer Falter Wither has garnered enthusiastic praise in its native Ireland, where the Irish Times pointed to Baume’s “astonishing power with language” and praised it as “a novel bursting with brio, braggadocio and bite.” “Baume has a rare ability to look afresh at muted scenes and ordinary objects… the book hums with its own distinctiveness.”—The Guardian, UK

A young artist in the midst of a breakdown escapes to the Irish countryside in this “cleareyed, beautiful rendering of a woman struggling against despair” (Kirkus). Shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize A twenty-something artist, Frankie is struggling to cope with urban life—and life in general. So she retreats to her family’s rural house on “turbine hill,” vacant since her grandmother’s death three years earlier. Surrounded by countryside and wild creatures, she can finally grapple with the chain of events that led her here—her shaky mental health, her difficult time in art school—and maybe even regain her footing in art and life. Reconsidering the relevance of art and closely examining the natural world around her, Frankie begins to pick up photography once more. With “prose that makes sure we look and listen,” Sara Baume has written an intimate and powerful novel that is also a meditation on wildness, community, the art world, and mental illness (Atlantic). “Fascinating, because of the cumulative power of the precise, pleasingly rhythmic sentences, and the unpredictable intelligence of the narrator’s mind.” —Guardian, UK

From Gaelic annals and medieval poetry to contemporary Irish literature, A History of Irish Literature and the Environment examines the connections between the Irish environment and Irish literary culture. Themes such as Ireland's island ecology, the ecological history of colonial-era plantation and deforestation, the Great Famine, cultural attitudes towards animals and towards the land, the postcolonial politics of food and energy generation, and the Covid-19 pandemic - this book shows how these factors determine not only a history of the Irish environment but also provide fresh perspectives from which to understand and analyze Irish literature. An international team of contributors provides a comprehensive analysis of Irish literature to show how the literary has always been deeply engaged with environmental questions in Ireland, a crucial new perspective in an age of climate crisis. A History of Irish Literature and the Environment reveals the socio-cultural, racial, and gendered aspects embedded in questions of the Irish environment.

“One of the most beautiful novels I have ever read.” —New York Times Book Review A stunning, powerful novel about a couple that pushes against traditional expectations, moving with their dogs to the Irish countryside where they embed themselves in nature and make attempts to disappear from society. It is the winter following the summer they met. A couple, Bell and Sigh, move into a remote house in the Irish countryside with their dogs. Both solitary with misanthropic tendencies, they leave the conventional lives stretched out before them to build another—one embedded in ritual, and away from the friends and family from whom they’ve drifted. They arrive at their new home on a clear January day and look up to appraise the view. A mountain gently and unspectacularly ascends from the Atlantic, “as if it had accumulated stature over centuries. As if, over centuries, it had steadily flattened itself upwards.” They make a promise to climb the mountain, but—over the course of the next seven years—it remains unclimbed. We move through the seasons with Bell and Sigh as they come to understand more about the small world around them, and as their interest in the wider world recedes. Seven Steeples is a beautiful and profound meditation on the nature of love and the resilience of nature. Through Bell and Sigh, and the life they create for themselves, Sara Baume explores what it means to escape the traditional paths laid out before us—and what it means to evolve in devotion to another person, and to the landscape.

Presents essays by thirty-five leading scholars of Irish fiction that provide authoritative assessments of the breadth and achievement of Irish novelists and short story writers.

While the national narrative coming out of Ireland since the 2008 economic crisis has been relentlessly sanguine, fiction has offered a more nuanced perspective from both well-established and emerging authors. In Broken Irelands, McGlynn examines Irish fiction of the post-crash era, addressing the proliferation of writing that downplays realistic and grammatical coherence. Noting that these traits have the effect of diminishing human agency, blurring questions of responsibility, and emphasizing emotion over rationality, McGlynn argues that they reflect and respond to social and economic conditions during the global economic crisis and its aftermath of recession, austerity, and precarity. Rather than focusing on overt discussions of the crash and recession, McGlynn explores how the dominance of an economic worldview, including a pervasive climate of financialized discourse, shapes the way stories are told. In the writing of such authors as Anne Enright, Colum McCann, Mike McCormack, and Lisa McInerney, McGlynn unpacks the ways that formal departures from realism through grammatical asymmetries like unconventional verb tenses, novel syntactic choices, and reliance on sentence fragments align with a cultural moment shaped by feelings of impotence and rhetorics of personal responsibility.

'Inspiring' - Cathy Rentzenbrink, author of Write It All Down 'Fascinating and useful' - Joe Moran, author of First You Write A Sentence Bestselling and award-winning authors share the secrets to their success, and the hard lessons they have learnt along the way. Where do the best ideas come from? How do you stay motivated? What does it take to become a published author? And how do you actually make money from your writing? For over five years the hosts of Always Take Notes podcast have posed their nosiest questions to some of the world's greatest writers. The result is a compendium of frank and frequently entertaining guidance for living a creative life. From the early failures that shaped them to the daily challenges of writing and the habits that keep them on track, literary luminaries offer guidance to inspire. Featuring: Alexander McCall Smith, Anne Enright, Candice Carty-Williams, Christina Lamb, Colin Thubron, Colum McCann, David Mitchell, Elif Shafak, George Packer, Hadley Freeman, Hollie McNish, Ian McEwan, Ian Rankin, Irvine Welsh, Jeffrey Archer, Joanne Harris, Kate Mosse, Kiran Millwood Hargrave, Kit de Waal, Louise Doughty, Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Maggie Fergusson, Mark Haddon, Marlon James, Max Hastings, May Jeong, Merve Emre, Monica Ali, Niall Ferguson, Nikesh Shukla, Oliver Bullough, Orlando Figes, Patrick Kingsley, Rory Stewart, Rosie Nixon, Ruth Ozeki, Ruth Padel, Sam Knight, Samanth Subramanian, Samira Shackle, Sara Baume, Sebastian Junger, Simon Lancaster, Simon Scarrow, Stig Abell, Terri White, Tessa Hadley, Tim Rice, Toby Young, Tracy Chevalier, William Boyd, William Dalrymple, and many more...