'Luminous' SEBASTIAN BARRY 'Incandescent characters and mellifluous prose' LISA CAREY 'Reminiscent of Edith Wharton at her very best' LIZ NUGENT _________ The true story of a woman ahead of her time . . . In 1887, Isabel Bilton is the eldest of three daughters of a middle-class military family, growing up in a small garrison town. By 1891 she is the Countess of Clancarty, dubbed "the peasant countess" by the press, and a member of the Irish aristocracy. Becoming Belle is the story of the four years in between, of Belle's rapid ascent and the people that tried to tear her down. Reimagined by a novelist at the height of her powers, Belle is an unforgettable woman. Set against an absorbing portrait of Victorian London, hers is a timeless rags-to-riches story a la Becky Sharpe. _________ Praise for BECOMING BELLE 'Nuala O'Connor has the thrilling ability to step back nimbly and enter the deep dance of time. This is a hidden history laid luminously before us of an exultant Anglo-Irish woman navigating the dark shoals and the bright fields of a life' SEBASTIAN BARRY, award-winning author of The Secret Scripture and Days Without End 'Becoming Belle is so mesmerizing you will be distraught when it ends.O'Connor has resurrected a fiery, inexorable woman who rewrites the script on a stage supposedly ruled by men. Sensual, witty, daring, and unapologetically forward.' Lisa Carey, author of The Stolen Child 'Belle's determination to live her life on her own terms and in defiance of her times makes her a fascinating subject' Irish Central 'Masterful storytelling! I was putty in Nuala O'Connor's hands. She made the unsinkable Belle Bilton and her down-to-earth sister Flo real to me, and brought 1880's London to my living room. Encore! Encore!' Lynn Cullen, bestselling author of Mrs. Poe 'A glorious novel in which Belle Bilton and 19th century London are brought roaring to life with exquisite period detail' Hazel Gaynor, New York Times bestselling author of A Memory of Violets 'Thoroughly engrossing and entertaining read' Liz Nugent 'Thrillingly dramatic and achingly moving and profoundly resonant into this present era' Robert Olen Butler, author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain 'O'Connor gently unfolds Belle's tale in a manner that is compelling and disarming. The ambience may be Victorian elegance but the sheer honesty of O'Connor's writing is sensual, authentic and earthy. A delight!' Rose Servitova, author of The Longbourn Letters

Washing Windows III anthology is representative of contemporary Irish literature, and of a new society and a new way of accepting and honouring the talent all around us.

The writers in Washing Windows Too have things on their minds that have exploded into that love-urgency that makes writers write. And, just as it should be, few subjects are off limits. A poet may not always love her inspirational material, but those here revere the act of writing so much - value it so much - that honing their ideas, visions, and insights into poem-shaped, concrete objects has become crucial. It is an honour to witness what has urged these writers to the process of thought, cogitation, sentence, and finally, poem. Many writers use writing as an attempt to solve life's conundrums - to solve themselves. And to understand the self and others better, too, because writing is the best way they know to gain sight into, and survive, the vagaries of life. Perhaps the writers in this anthology are like me - maybe for them, too, writing is their sanity and their joy, their best thinking and settling tool. A poem can be a path into the deepest, purest self, and back out again - through the very act of writing - to a calmer, less frenetic place. Because poets deal with issues that concern them - universal truths, often - certain themes emerge, as they do in all anthologies. In Washing Windows Too, particular groupings of motifs re-occur and these include birth and motherhood; child-love and empty nests; migration and refugees; women's power and agency; bodies, the male gaze, and violence; nature and its beauties; art, creation, and the act of writing itself; uneasy relationships; politics; health and illness; and grief and death. And, because we are living in the early twenty-twenties, the pandemic naturally features in some poems

Love is the central force in Birdie, a collection of sixteen historical and out-of-time flash fictions that sing with the voices of women loving and losing and learning. The characters here find strength, despite the sorrows of death and deceit: a ghost-child returns to Massachusetts to comfort her grieving mother; the daughter of a Spanish orange tycoon regrets her mother’s terrible choices; an English maid longs for, but can’t be with, her mistress’s son. Birdie contains Nuala O’Connor’s signature ekphrastic work, drawing on artists as diverse as Matisse, da Vinci, and American painter Edwin Romanzo Elmer. The natural world looms large too: sheep and foxes roam these pages, as much as seawater washes through them. Described by the Toronto Star as a writer of ‘magical imagination’ and by the Washington Post as ‘soaring’, O’Connor’s collection of historical flash will delight her readers, old and new.