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  MAKER'S NAME THE - A family saga

  Seamus McKenna

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  A literary, historical, Irish family-saga fiction piece, for grownups 
  Lucid, engaging prose covering half a century of a provincial Irish business family, which could be microcosmic of the nation, from a first-time author. 
  The Considine brothers, Rudi and Gus, are at war.  
  Their father, Malachi, has died in a ‘freak accident’. But are there actually such things as freak accidents? When Rudi attempts to grab Gus’s inheritance there’s a real prospect of human blood appearing on the Hawthorne Meats slaughterhouse floor. Enter Cosgrave, a solicitor with expensive tastes, and Toomarood, the banker with an eye to making money outside of his day job. Mix in the ‘free’ energy device, after experts have stated that the promoters are suffering from long-term, severe self-delusion. Does this all make up a catastrophe waiting to happen?  
           How will Gus’s childhood friend, Raymond Quinn, his partner, Kaarina, and their children, be able to deal with him being placed under an exit ban in China because of his part in a pyramid scheme that has defrauded Chinese small investors? Is Gus really the nice guy everyone thinks he is? His activities as a ‘celebrity butcher’ might suggest otherwise. Does Rudi go too far by defrauding Quinn senior and his business partner through the use of a shadow company? 
           Is Rudi capable of murder? 
           And Rudi’s wife, Penny - whose side is she on? 
           Treachery hangs over this story of the pressures and tensions, both personal and commercial, of Celtic-Tiger era Ireland, especially when that edifice is destroyed in the Global Financial Crisis of 2008.  
           For Rudi, the payback from Gus and Raymond is severe indeed.

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  Compassion - A powerful tale...

  Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

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  Vicente Blasco Ibáñez was born in Valencia, Spain on 29th January 1867.  
   
  At university, he studied law and graduated in 1888 but never felt the urgency to practice - he was more interested in politics, journalism, literature and women.   
   
  Politically he was a militant Republican partisan and, in his youth, founded a newspaper, El Pueblo (The People). The newspaper was taken to court many times and he made many enemies. In one incident he was shot and almost killed. In 1896, Ibáñez was arrested and sentenced to a few months in prison. 
   
  Despite this colourful background he found time to write novels. His first published work was ‘La Araña Negra’ (The Black Spider) in 1892, a work that he later repudiated although at the time it was a useful vehicle for him to express his anti-clerical views. 
   
  In 1894, he published ‘Arroz y Tartana’ (Airs and Graces), about a late 19th Century widow in Valencia trying to keep up appearances in order to marry her daughters well.   
   
  Ibáñez’s next sequence of books studied rural life in the farmlands of Valencia and failed to gain much of an audience.   
   
  His writing now took on a new direction with its now familiar sensational and melodramatic themes in 1908 with ‘Sangre y Arena’ (Blood and Sand), which follows the career of Juan Gallardo from his poor beginnings as a child in Seville, to his rise to becoming a famous matador in Madrid 
   
  However, his greatest success was ‘Los Cuatro Jinetes del Apocalipsis (The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse) in 1916, which tells a tangled tale of the French and German sons-in-law of an Argentinian land-owner who find themselves fighting on opposite sides in the First World War.  It was a literary and commercial sensation and became the best-selling book of 1919.  It also propelled Rudolph Valentino to stardom in the 1921 film. 
   
  Ironically his fame in the English-speaking world has come not as a novelist but as the stories behind some of Hollywood’s greatest silent movies. 
   
  Vicente Blasco Ibáñez died in Menton, France on January 28th, 1928, the day before his 61st birthday.

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  Mater 2-10

  Hwang Sok-yong

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  Centred on three generations of a family of rail workers and a laid-off factory worker staging a high-altitude sit-in, Mater 2-10 vividly depicts the lives of ordinary working Koreans, starting from the Japanese colonial era, continuing through Liberation, and right up to the twenty-first century. It is at once a powerful account that captures a nation’s longing for a rail line to reconnect North and South, a magical-realist novel that manages to reflect the lives of modern industrial workers, and a culmination of Hwang’s career ? a masterpiece thirty years in the making. A true voice of a generation, Hwang shows again why he is unmatched when it comes to depicting the grief of a divided nation and bringing to life the cultural identity and trials and tribulations of the Korean people.

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  The Elopement - A Powerful...

  Tracy Rees

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  'A beautiful book. Powerful and captivating, the story will transport you to another time and place, plunging you headlong into the lives of its characters. Tracy Rees's writing is fluid, vibrant and evocative. Extraordinarily good.' - Hazel PriorTracy Rees's latest novel The Elopement is an elaborately imagined historical novel full of delight and temptation, spanning the luxury and poverty of late Victorian England.A wealthy heiress . . .1897. Rowena Blythe is wealthy, entitled and beautiful. As her twenty-fourth birthday approaches, she’s expected to marry – and to marry well.An unsuitable match . . .Her parents commission a portrait of Rowena to help cement her reputation as a great society beauty. However, Bartek, the artist’s young assistant, is unlike any man Rowena has met before – wild, romantic and Bohemian. While society at large awaits the announcement of Rowena’s engagement, it is Bartek who captures Rowena’s heart along with her likeness.A scandal in society . . .Rowena knows her parents would never approve of Bartek, who in their eyes is nothing but a penniless foreigner. As her feelings grow, she has no-one to turn to. Dare she risk everything for love?Praise for Tracy Rees:‘a natural storyteller . . .’ – Rachel Hore‘Tracy has a rare gift for creating characters you are rooting for from the first page’ – Gill Paul‘has such a talent for writing engaging characters who stay with you’ – Hazel Gaynor‘Tracy Rees is at the height of her game’ – Rebecca Griffiths

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  The Incorrigible Rogue

  Cynn Chadwick

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  Rochdale, Lancashire, England, 1885.
   
  Martha Anne Ashworth is in trouble in school, once again. The precocious and 
  gifted 10 year old daughter of mill owner John Ashworth has, for the 
  umpteenth time, tried school and parental patience and now legal authority with her quick wit, sharp tongue, impudent defiance, and certain determined independence. With her mother dying, and her father drowning his woes in whisky, young Martha Anne’s wildness leads to her eventual arrest as an Incorrigible Rogue; all seems to be spiraling out of control until an uncanny friendship with the village wise woman, Betty Nuppy, helps guide Martha Anne on a path to salvation, if not, at least, redemption.

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  Uncertain Legacy An

  Susan Greenwood

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  1659: Alone at fifteen years old, Elisabeth Osborne is easy prey as she fancies she can manage on her own in Paris, but a chance meeting with the madam of a gentlemen's club changes her mind. It is here she receives protection, the sort of education not taught in convents, and, just as important, the freedom to practice her skill with herbal remedies without fear. 
   
   
   
  But it isn't only her unusual knowledge of plants and the workings of the body which might land her in danger. In times of stress, she is capable of extraordinary feats which she cannot always control and which she struggles to keep secret. 
   
   
   
  Blessed with good looks, education, and an aristocratic air, it's not long before Elisabeth is pursued and swept up into high society, where she quickly learns that women who wish to be independent need to be clever, for there are few choices open to them in a patriarchal society where the law is very much against them. 
   
   
   
  Elisabeth doesn't know her mother's English family or who her father is—and she doesn't know why she's able to see and do things others can't. She sets out to find answers, traveling to Brittany and across to England, where London is gripped by plague and fire.

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