Broken Irelands

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.

A passionate, heartbreaking story of authority and revenge, alcoholism and futile redemption set in south Boston in the late 1990s.

The English language in the Renaissance was in many ways a collection of competing Englishes. Blank investigates the representation of alternative vernaculars in both linguistic and literary works of the time.

'One of the most talented crime writers alive' Washington Post 'I've been enthusiastically telling everyone who will listen to read Tana French' Harlan Coben, author of Safe Sometimes there is no safe place. Nothing about the way this family lived shows why they deserved to die. But here's the thing about murder: ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it doesn't break into people's lives. It gets there because they open the door and invite it in... In Broken Harbour, a ghost estate outside Dublin - half-built, half-inhabited, half-abandoned - two children and their father are dead. The mother is on her way to intensive care. Scorcher Kennedy is given the case because he is the Murder squad's star detective. At first he and his rookie partner, Richie, think this is a simple one: Pat Spain was a casualty of the recession, so he killed his children, tried to kill his wife Jenny, and finished off with himself. But there are too many inexplicable details and the evidence is pointing in two directions at once. Scorcher's personal life is tugging for his attention. Seeing the case on the news has sent his sister Dina off the rails again, and she's resurrecting something that Scorcher thought he had tightly under control: what happened to their family, one summer at Broken Harbour, back when they were children. The neat compartments of his life are breaking down, and the sudden tangle of work and family is putting both at risk . . .

When Korean American Jasmine Yap's long-time boyfriend, Paul, is caught cheating on her, her giant, overprotective family secretly arranges to use her graduation party to introduce her to Orlando's most eligible men.

“The law says I can’t love her. I don’t care what the law says. I’m gonna love her anyway.” -Lion Maxwell FEEL THE BEAST. The night the EMTs wheeled Lion Maxwell into my Emergency Room turned my life upside down. Although he was bloody and battered from defending his title as the reigning cruiserweight champion of Mixed Martial Arts, his cocky grin lit up the room. And every cell in my body. Our fiery chemistry was off the charts. The ER staff sensed it. Lion’s entourage and his drooling groupies sensed it too. SHE SAID SHE DIDN’T WANT ME. SHE WAS WRONG. If the two of us had been alone, I might have done something entirely unprofessional and completely unethical right there in the exam room. But I was his attending physician. A sexual or romantic relationship with him was grounds for my termination or worse, revoking my medical license. I wouldn’t risk my career on a moment of passion. It didn’t stop that arrogant caveman from doing everything he could to get me into his hospital bed. WANTING HIM WOULD RUIN ME… After denying his advances for weeks, the last thing I expected were the wild nights he would be spending in my bed. It was supposed to be nothing more than a secret fling. I knew it couldn’t last. He was still my patient. What we were doing was wrong. If anyone found out, it could ruin my life. But we couldn’t let go. We were bound to each other on some primal level that consumed us. Sometimes love is tragic. Sometimes two people aren’t meant to be together. But sometimes, two people overcome all adversity and build a love that lasts forever. Deep in my heart I knew that Lion Maxwell could be my forever love. As long as we kept our love a secret. I wish I’d known beforehand that some secrets are too hard to keep… ***Broken Lion is a scorching hot standalone romance with an HEA and no cheating.

In this remarkable sequel to his critically acclaimed memoir Watching the Door, Irish journalist Kevin Myers reflects on his roller-coaster career over three decades in the Irish media, from the European conflicts he reported from to the personal conflicts he fought. Fresh from the horrors of 1970s Belfast, Myers took a job in 1979 with The Irish Times, and brilliantly evokes the comical chaos of life in the smoky newsroom of Ireland’s paper-of-record. Having taken over An Irishman’s Diary, Myers single-handedly pioneered the campaign to rehabilitate the memory of the forgotten Irish soldiers of the Great War, and in the process fell foul of the paper’s editor, the legendary Douglas Gageby. His reward were plane tickets to more perilous assignments as Myers was back in the frontline of European warzones, as communism collapsed and civil wars emerged. While Myers is at his brilliant best dodging bullets on the battlefields of Tel Aviv, Beirut and Sarajevo, he also keenly and unapologetically participates in the many cultural conflicts erupting within a rapidly changing Ireland, as he opines on a broad spectrum of Irish life, covering history, politics, religion, economics, culture and society; all explored in his inimitable prose and sardonic wit. This courageously trenchant account of journalistic conflict and hubris also forensically examines his very public fall from grace in 2017, and his legal battle with RTÉ for a public apology. Burning Heresies is a candid and eye-opening must-read for anyone with even a passing interest in Irish life and current affairs.