This vivid memoir chronicles life in a small Gaeltacht area in Munster that has remained largely immune to outside influences because of its isolated location. O Maolchathaigh is an astute observer of people and place. His recollections of a ""lost world"" are unique and searing in their honesty.

Two Irish migrants on the cusp of new lives in post-war Britain. Two young people who dare to dream of a better life, and dance the music of survival in their adopted homeland. Afraid that his wife and children will arrive over any day, Trevor is in a hurry to settle old scores with his rivals and to prove himself the top fighting man within his London-Irish community of drinkers and navvies while Nano seeks to escape the stifling conformity and petty jealousies of her peers and forget her failed love-match at home. Will Trevor finally prove himself "the man" and secure the respect that he feels is his by virtue of blood and tribe? Does Nano have it in her to break free of the suffocating bonds of home and community and find love with Lithuanian beau Julius? Written at a time when the Irish were "building England up and tearing it down again," and teeming with the raucous energy of post-war Kilburn, Cricklewood and Camden Town this novel is one of the very few authentic portrayals of working-class life in modern Irish literature. Up to one in four UK citizens claims Irish heritage. For each decade of the 1950s alone - a time of British postwar boom and Irish economic decline - over half of Ireland's population, those coming of age in that decade, emigrated: the majority to England. And while Irish-owned companies today account for one tenth of the almost GBP100bn British construction industry, those navvies who built our homes, roads and hotels comprise a forgotten generation, alongside the nurses that made the crossing alone to power our nascent Welfare State. Donall Mac Amhlaigh was among them, working on construction sites throughout London and the Midlands, including the M1 and M6 motorways. In this autobiographical novel are the people who later calcified into stereotypes of Irish immigrants and their haunts: the navvy, the drinker, the fighter, the nurse. As with the Polish builder, Romanian gangster or Spanish nurse of today, such caricatures have their source in real lives adapting to economic reality. 'A wonderful addition to Irish literature.' - Colum McCann, National Book Award winner 'I cannot stress strongly enough the importance of bringing this work to a wider readership.' -Tony Murray - Director, Irish Studies Centre, London Metropolitan University, London. 'Donall Mac Amhlaigh is the most perceptive and informed writer on the Irish in 20th century Britain.' - Professor Enda Delaney, author of The Irish in Post-War Britain

First published in Irish by An Gum in 1965, Seosamh Mac Grianna's magnificent autobiographical novel Mo Bhealach Fein is translated here for the first time into English by Micheal O hAodha. With notes of Dead as Doornails and The Ginger Man in its absurd comedy, Mac Grianna pens his reaction to an anglicised, urbanised, post-revolution Ireland, demonstrating his talents at their peak. This Road of Mine relates a humorous, picaresque journey through Wales en route for Scotland, an Irish counterpart to Three Men in a Boat with a twist of Down and Out in Paris and London. The protagonist follows his impulses, getting into various absurd situations: being caught on the Irish Sea in a stolen rowboat in a storm; feeling guilt and terror in the misplaced certainty that he had killed the likeable son of his landlady with a punch while fleeing the rent; sleeping outdoors in the rain and rejecting all aid on his journey. What lies behind his misanthropy is a reverence for beauty and art and a disgust that the world doesn't share his view, concerning itself instead with greed and pettiness. The prose is full of personality, and O hAodha has proved himself adept at capturing the life and spark of the writer's style. His full-spirited translation has given the English-reading world access to this charming and relentlessly entertaining bohemian poet, full of irrepressible energy for bringing trouble on himself. As well as the undoubted importance of this text culturally, Mac Grianna is able to make rank misanthropy enjoyable - making music out of misery. The voice is wonderful: hyperbolic but sincere.

Loodeen Winders - Lewy, six years of age - is growing up sharp. It's the turbulent early 1920s in a market town in the west of Ireland. Free State soldiers patrol in front of the Workhouse. Lewy's worried about his father's car being commandeered again. The nuns loom over Lewy and his classmates, amongst them the orphans - those shadowy figures, 'slobbery and weak and raggy'. Encounters with Violet and 'Brazenface' Rosaleen McInally in the woods play on Lewy's mind, even while he's trying to fathom the death of his beloved Grandfather. For a treat he goes behind the screen at the Pictures where his father creates the sound effects with his 'Jazzdrums' for the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Lewy's mother works magic on the sewing machine and picks up the pieces when things get out of hand - like the time he breaks his arm walking the wire in their backyard circus. On the fortieth anniversary of Eoghan O Tuairisc's death, this is the first appearance in English of the frank, funny voice of Lewy, a vital witness of his place and time.

Stories set in Ireland, Slovenia, Slovakia, and India, penetrating stories woven out of Gabriel Rosenstock's own fantastic worlds, some newly translated from the Irish, others appearing in English for the first time. 'The Partisan and other stories' has a stunning range of moods, styles, voices and themes - from the quirky and mirth-provoking to the magically lyrical - all inviting the reader to engage in an entrancing and passionate conversation about the nature of reality.

Irish migrants in new communities: Seeking the Fair Land? comprises the second collection of essays by these editors exploring fresh aspects and perspectives on the subject of the Irish diaspora. This volume, edited by Mairtin O Cathain and Micheal O hAodha, develops many of the oral history themes of the first book and concentrates more on issues surrounding the adaptation of migrants to new or host environments and cultures. These new places often have a jarring effect, as well as a welcoming air, and the Irish bring their own interpretations, hostilities, and suspicions, all of which are explored in a fascinating and original number of new perspectives.

The relationship between Ireland and the diversity of its diasporas has always been complex and multi-layered, but it is not until recently that this reality has really been acknowledged in the public sphere and indeed, amongst the scholarly community generally. This reality is partly a consequence of both "push-and-pull" factors and the relatively late arrival of globalization trends to the island of Ireland itself, situated as it is on the Atlantic seaboard between Europe and the US. Ireland is changing however, some would say at an unprecedented speed as compared with many of its neighbours, and the sense of Irish identity and connection to the home country is changing too. What is the relationship of Ireland and the Irish with its diaspora communities and how is this articulated? The voices who speak in New Perspectives on the Irish Abroad: The Silent People?, edited by Micheal O hAodha and Mairtin O Cathain, "talk back" to Ireland and Ireland talks to them, and it is in telling that we see a new story, an emerging discourse-the narratives of the "hidden" Irish, the migrant Irish, the diaspora whose voices and refrains were hitherto neglected or subject to silence.

As with its European neighbours, Ireland is home to a number of festivals which celebrate the art of travel writing, the annual Lismore Festival of Travel Writing in County Waterford for example. The modern genre of travel writing as practiced by Irish writers is very different to much of what passed for travel writing in Ireland, until very recently. In the colonial context that defined Irish history and culture prior to the last century, travel writing was frequently viewed an adjunct to the all-knowing imperial gaze. It was an element in that tradition which sought to know, to define and to categorise peoples and their places. It was part of the ordering process that was the colonial project. It was a celebration of knowing which we now realise was frequently a charade. In many cases, as with the travel accounts produced by members of the colonial class in Eastern Europe or Asia, these descriptions of other peoples and cultures were produced in accordance with an inherited and (sometimes-exoticised) tradition or episteme as littered with cliche and stereotype. In many cases the writers or hobbyists in question knew next to nothing about the people they were describing; they frequently had only the vaguest knowledge concerning the cultures or languages that they were classifying . This book usurps this tradition. While the vast majority of Irish travelogues as written in the past two centuries were written in English, this travelogue was written (and published originally) in Irish before later being translated and re-shaped in English .

The Willow's Whisper brings the voices of 35 poets from the Irish and Native American communities together in one compilation. This collection of poems provides an aesthetic commentary on the potential which is beyond and within the everyday. From Gabriel Rosenstock and Biddy Jenkinson to N. Scott Momaday and Karenne Wood, mother-earth comes to life through each sound and syllable, and reawakens our senses to the world at its most beautiful and evocative. This volume will aid us to reconnect with that part of our being which we may have lost touch with; that part of us intimately linked to nature. It will help us see life in every meandering stream as it surges and animates, and in the breeze moving through the branches of a willow-a whisper of hope.