Mamie, the caretaker of a performing hall, lives in its dusty attic. Taking little care of the building and less of herself, she spends most of her time and money on whiskey and cigarettes. Mamie hears Romeo and Juliet which is being performed and it brings back happy and sad memories. 2 women, 2 men

Full colour, illustrated and hardback poetry book containing poetry on all the seasons for young readers. It includes poems about nature, the landscape, the weather and children's experiences of the seasons from ice-creams to Christmas trees. An accompanying ebook will be free to download, introducing children to the poetic forms used in the book and chock-full of ideas to encourage readers to try their hand at writing their own poems. It will be especially helpful also to teachers who would like to include writing poetry as a classroom activity with their pupils. The full-colour illustrations are by Lauren O'Neill, winner of the Children's Books Ireland Award for Illustration in 2016.

Johnny, an outstanding young swimmer, went missing nearly thirty years ago: drowned, or so everyone except his sister Imogen believes. How could this have happened? Encouraged, pushed even, from a child by his father, Johnny could have made the Olympic team, couldn't he? As Imogen gradually pieces together bits of her family history, we hear the tragic echoes that connect her with the Great War and Ireland in the nineteen-twenties.

Constance Keating has lived a life of internal exile, alienated from her family and from Ireland. Now she has returned to her family home to die. While that painful, messy process takes place she replays, like a home movie, the fragments of her past. And, as the festooned Christmas tree awaits its day, so Constance also waits, hoping her child's father will come and that the final outcome will be on her terms.

In a house overlooking Dublin Bay, Mimi and her daughter Grace are disturbed by the unexpected arrival of Grace's daughter Polly, and her striking new boyfriend. The events of the next few days will lead both of them to reassess the shape of their lives. For while Grace's visitors focus her attention on an uncertain future, Mimi, who receives a messenger of a very different kind, must begin to set herself to rights with the betrayals and disappointments of the past.

Derry in the 1970s: teenager Joe Logan is growing up in the teeth of the Troubles, having to cope with embittered parents, a brother who's been away and come back with money and a gun in his pocket, harsh school teachers, and the constant awareness of the military presence in the background. Central to the story is the friendship that tentatively grows up between Joe and Kathleen, a young school-teacher who brings a fresh perspective to his familiar world.

All families are complicated, but some are more complicated than others. And Christmas can only make matters worse. After Ciara's estranged father is nearly killed by his second wife in a car accident - or was it an accident? - Ciara begins, gingerly, to reenter his life. As her troubled family gather for the holidays, is it too much to hope that they begin to find peace at last? Of course it is. With cross-dressing twins, new loves and an unpredicatably monstrous matriarch, Christmas was never going to be easy. But it proves both more disastrous and happier than any of them could have guessed.

Sally, a successful actress, returns to her house in Goatstown from a European tour, just wanting to rest and to see her husband, Charlie, again. When Charlie announces that he's leaving her, Sally angrily forces him to pack his bags at once. But maybe, she wonders later, she really is too hard to live with? Hoping for some glimmer of insight into the family secrets that have always dogged her, Sally turns to her grandfather, the frosty old Bishop she has never really known.

On a rainy afternoon on Killiney Hill a young man walking, without his overcoat, happens upon a woman gazing out over Dublin bay, standing perilously close to the edge. From their testy encounter develops a remarkable friendship which will enable each to face afresh their very different, damaged pasts, and to look, however tentatively, towards the future.

When Stella first meets Martyn, he's just a stranger on a train. She knows nothing at all about him. But very quickly she is won over by his charm and breathtaking illusions, and when he asks her to marry him, she agrees. However, as they begin their life together, Stella starts to feel uneasy. What exactly is the show-stopping illusion he claims to be working on, locked away in that room? Who are those men that visit the house at strange hours? And why are her questions never answered? As Stella realises that she barely knows the man she married, her thoughts turn to escape.

The Great War is over; but the war in Ireland is only just beginning, as the IRA and the Black and Tans move on to the attack. It all seems very remote to Miranda Martin, during that miraculous Indian summer. Her father, hoping to forget his dead wife, thinks of nothing but his trees; Miranda thinks of the future, a future which must surely include Cathal, who brings news from Dublin. Everything seems calm and serene. But then Andrew, her officer brother, comes home, bringing his eccentric, likeable friend Harry, and as the Indian summer fades, the scene is set for tragedy.

Helen has retreated to the remote north-west coast of Ireland to paint the sea and the shore, and to be alone with her past. English war hero Roger Hawthorne has settled in the neglected railway station house nearby. Mutilated and sick at heart, with the help of a young lad he has begun painstakingly to restore the derelict branch line station. Soon Roger and Helen form a bond which, over gramophone music, dancing and champagne, deepens into love. But Helen, enjoying her first taste of happiness in years, is to learn just how brutally fleeting it can be.

From early adolescence, I had committed myself to joining the seemingly growing legions of women pumping their fists with a can-do spirit and a perfect balance of career and family. I fancied myself a textbook candidate for the League of Female Marvels.until the narcolepsy and nausea set in, and I chickened out. Sacrificing a few rungs on the corporate ladder to stay home and be a Full-Time Mom (FTM) surely would prove a noble, not to mention more orderly, move. And think of all the discretionary time and energy Cue laughter. Except within those rare close-knit and blackmail-toting friendships, the more maddening (yet equally funny) stories of motherhood are seldom shared-until now. From sex to sippy cups, the stories contained herein are told with candor, albeit through the eyes of a woman with a slight flair for the dramatic. Still, you may find them to serve as a mirror, a memoir, or a medicine to your own life-or that of any mom with whom you've ever lived. Occasionally sweet, always straight, The Myth of The Bonbons will strike a nerve with many women-and the men who find a well-timed placement of it on their nightstands.

The classic World War One novel, available as a Penguin Essential for the first time. Alec and Jerry shouldn't have been friends: Alec's life was one of privilege, while Jerry's was one of toil. But this hardly mattered to two young men whose shared love of horses brought them together and whose whole lives lay ahead of them. When war breaks out in 1914, both Jerry and Alec sign up - yet for quite different reasons. On the fields of Flanders they find themselves standing together, but once again divided: as officer and enlisted man. And it is there, surrounded by mud and chaos and death, that one of them makes a fateful decision whose consequences will test their friendship and loyalty to breaking point.

Mr Prendergast, an elderly Anglo-Irishman, is living out his last years in the decaying splendour of his family mansion. As his mind wanders through the gloom he finds it peopled with memories of his neglected wife, his pale shadow of a father, his icily glamorous mother and Alexander, the son she so jealously loved, killed in the First World War. With only his ill-tempered alcoholic gardener left to attend to him, Mr Prendergast is content to pass his days in such ghostly company. Until young Diarmid arrives, keen-eyed and carrot-haired, to disperse the gathering darkness with curiosity, and the promise of friendship.