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  Away Days - Thirty Years of...

  Gareth Maher

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  Over the last thirty years, the English Premier League has grown to become the richest and most popular league in football – and the Irish have been at the heart of its success since the very beginning.
  In exclusive interviews with thirty former and current players, and an in-depth analysis of Irish players' involvement, Gareth Maher celebrates the astounding contribution that the Republic of Ireland has made to the most famous league in the world of sport. 
  With insights from Seamus Coleman, John O'Shea, Niall Quinn, Shay Given, Jonathan Walters, Richard Dunne, Andrew Omobamidele and many more, Away Days uncovers the good, the bad & the ugly of a league that has been home to almost two-hundred Irish players.
  This is the story of Ireland's impact on the Premier League as told through the experiences of the players who have lived through the title wins and the relegation scraps, the big-money moves and the cancelling of contracts, the villian's disdain and the hero's acclaim over three whirlwind decades.

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  The Star - From their pens to...

  W F Harvey

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  William Fryer Harvey AM was born on 14th April 1885 into a wealthy Quaker family in Leeds, West Yorkshire. 
  He was educated at the Quaker Bootham School in Yorkshire and Leighton Park School in Reading before university at Balliol College, Oxford.  
  His health was fragile and he poured his energies into writing short stories and in 1910 published his first collection ‘Midnight House’. 
  In the Great War he was with the Friends' Ambulance Unit and then served as a surgeon-lieutenant in the Royal Navy.  There he received the Albert Medal for Lifesaving but lung damage received at that time troubled him for the rest of his life. 
  He continued to write short stories, and even a memoir, but by 1925 ill health had forced his retirement to any outside work.  Three years later he published his second collection which contained his macabre classic ‘The Beast with Five fingers’, only one more collection would come from his pen in his lifetime. 
  For many years of his life he now lived in Switzerland with his wife but a yearning to be home saw them come back to England in 1935. 
  W F Harvey died in Letchworth on the 4th June 1937. He was 52.

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  Am I Having Fun Now? - Anxiety...

  Suzi Ruffell

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  Winner of the Speakies award for the Best Self-Help AudiobookRead by the author, Suzi Ruffell, this audiobook includes exclusive behind-the-scenes conversations between Suzi and special guests, including Romesh Ranganathan, Josh Widdecombe, Tom Allen, Maisie Adams, Rosie Jones, and her mum.'A brilliant representation of anxiety made hilarious.' - Romesh RanganathanDoes peaking in high school ruin you for life?Was Miley Cyrus right, is it all about the climb (when it comes to building a career?)And what - scientifically - is the best way to mend a broken heart?Comedian Suzi Ruffell is considering life's big questions.In this brutally honest, funny, and often moving memoir, Suzi winningly tells her life story, and asks a host of experts to answer the tricky questions it prompts along the way. Diamond life advice comes from the likes of Elizabeth Day, Dolly Alderton, Charlene Douglas, Laura Bates, Dr Kirren Schnack, and more.From masking anxiety with musical theatre and struggling to find her groove at school, on stage, and in her love life, to (eventually) coming out, falling in love, and becoming a parent, Suzi lays her life bare with trademark wit, verve and style.Am I Having Fun Now? is riveting, relatable and revealing. Studded with brilliant, cutting observations on feminism, being working class in the world of arts and comedy, LGBTQ+ equality and the up- and downsides of ambition, it's perfect reading for fans of books by Fern Brady, Elizabeth Day, Romesh Ranganathan, Sarah Pascoe and Tom Allen.

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  Sicilian Limes - From their pens...

  Luigi Pirandello

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  Luigi Pirandello was born on 28th June 1867 into an upper-class family in Agrigento, in Sicily. 
  In 1880, the family moved to Palermo and there he completed high school and thence to the University of Palermo, at that time the centre of what became the Fasci Siciliani movement.  Although not an active member he had close friendships with many of its leading ideologists.  Pirandello then completed his university studies in Rome and Bonn, receiving his Doctorate in March, 1891. 
  His time in Rome had provided him with the opportunity to visit its many theatres. "Oh the dramatic theatre! I will conquer it. I cannot enter into one without experiencing a strange sensation, an excitement of the blood through all my veins..." 
  1894 brought marriage, at his father's suggestion, to a shy, withdrawn girl: Mara Antonietta Portulano.  The marriage encouraged his studies and writings and, the following year, the first part of the ‘Dialoghi tra Il Gran Me e Il Piccolo Me’ was published. 
  In 1903 the flooding of the sulphur mines in which his father had invested the family capital and Antonietta's dowry, brought financial catastrophe.  She, on hearing the news, was mentally broken.  Pirandello would now work a full day and then watch over his troubled wife at night. Somehow he found time to write ‘The Late Mattia Pascal’.  It was an immediate and resounding success.  
  In 1909, Pirandello began his collaboration with the prestigious Corriere della Sera.  Whilst his fame as a writer was increasing his private life was poisoned by the suspicion and jealousy of Antonietta who now turned physically violent.  His plays were now being regularly performed but, within a decade, Antonietta had to be placed into an asylum from which she never left. 
  In 1921, in Rome his play, ‘Six Characters in Search of an Author’ debuted.  It was a failure.  However, when presented in Milan it was a great success, as it also was in London and New York. 
  In 1925, Pirandello, with Mussolini’s help, assumed the artistic direction and ownership of the Teatro d'Arte di Roma.  He now described himself both as ‘a Fascist because I am Italian’ and ‘I'm apolitical, I'm only a man in the world...’  However his later conflicts with fascist leaders meant he fell under close surveillance by the OVRA, the secret police. 
  In 1934 he won the Nobel Prize but asked that the medal be melted down for Italy’s occupation of Abyssinia Campaign to which he had given his support.  
  Pirandello's canon stretches across novels, short stories, poetry, essays and some 40 plays.  His tragic farces are often cited as forerunners of the Theatre of the Absurd. 
  Luigi Pirandello died on the 10th December 1936 at his home at Via Bosio, Rome, Italy.  He was 69.

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  Raised By Wolves

  Jess Ho

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  Growing up Cantonese in the racist outer suburbs was hard enough for Jess Ho, but add in a dysfunctional family who only made peace over food, and it was clear that a normal life was never on the menu. Jess emerged from childhood with a major psychological complex and a kick-arse palate, traits that would help them fit right in to the messy world of Melbourne’s food scene. 
   
  In hospitality, Jess found a new family of outsiders who shared their lust for life and appetite for destruction. As the Australian food scene exploded, fuelled by the kinds of ‘exotic’ foods Jess had grown up on, they became one of the most influential voices in Australia’s bar and restaurant scene. But the industry Jess loved had its own dysfunctions: greed, ego, sexual harassment, exploitation and a never-ending fetishisation of Asian food culture. And Jess wasn’t one to hold their tongue. 
   
  Raised by Wolves is a fierce, funny and razor-sharp coming of age story from a savage new voice. 
   
  ‘Jess Ho’s Raised by Wolves is a cutting memoir full of joy and tragedy. This is a life in the Melbourne hospitality industry that deserves a place on your shelf’. JASON STEGER, The Booklist

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  Goodbye Transylvania - A...

  Sigmund Heinz Landau

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  A Romanian soldier details serving for Germany on the Eastern Front during World War II in this memoir, featuring firsthand accounts of combat. German by ancestry, born and raised in the ethnic welter of post-World War I Romania, Sigmund Heinz Landau left his home to volunteer for the Third Reich during World War II. Serving on the Eastern Front, he saw nearly six years of continuous fighting with a Luftwaffe Flak unit and eventually in the Waffen-SS, from sentry duty to desperate attacks against Soviet T-34s, from the siege of Budapest to the final campaign for Berlin in 1945. Landau’s memoir, written from a unique perspective, offers rare insight into what motivated soldiers to fight—and die—for Nazi Germany.

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