Showing results by narrator "Alan Smyth" in All Categories

With the legends and lore of Ireland running through his blood, falconer Connor O’Dwyer is proud to call County Mayo home. It’s where his sister, Branna, lives and works, where his cousin, Iona, has found true love, and where his childhood friends form a circle that can’t be broken. A circle that is about to be stretched out of shape - by a long-awaited kiss. Meara Quinn is Branna’s best friend, a sister in all but blood. Her and Connor’s paths cross almost daily, as Connor takes tourists on hawk walks and Meara guides them on horseback across the lush countryside.

Three men search for some version of home; their lives move inexorably toward a reckoning that will draw them all together. For Farouk, family is all. He has protected his wife and daughter as best he can from the war and hatred that has torn Syria apart. If they stay, they will lose their freedom. Lampy is distracted; he has too much going on in his small town life in Ireland. He has the city girl for a bit of fun, but she's not Chloe. The game was always the lifeblood coursing through John's veins: manipulating people for his enjoyment. But it was never enough.

Miss Ada Quicksilver, a student of London's Lovelace Academy for Promising Young Women, is spending her holiday in Ireland to pursue her anthropological study of fairies. She visits Dublin's absinthe bars to investigate a supposed association between absinthe and fairy sightings. One night a handsome Irishman approaches her, introducing himself as Edward Donoghue. Edward takes absinthe to relieve his sleepwalking. She discovers that he's the earl of Meath, and that he will soon visit a mysterious ruin. On learning about Ada's area of study, he invites her to accompany him.

Feeling her stardom fading, struggling soap-actress Adele Rafferty is ready to give up on her dreams when she gets a last-minute offer to play the lead in upcoming horror film Final Draft. Could this be her big break? Will she have redemption for what happened the last time she was on a film set? Adele doesn’t think twice before signing the dotted line. But when life on set starts to mirror the sinister events portrayed in the script, Adele fears the real horror lies off the page. Isolated and unsure who in the crew she can trust, is there anywhere or any time left to run?

In The Oxygen Advantage, Patrick McKeown combines his successful breathing exercises with techniques designed to simulate high-altitude training in a highly successful programme that will significantly improve anyone's health but will also empower athletes to improve their sports performance. These scientifically validated exercises have the potential to drastically improve your overall fitness, whether you are a habitual couch potato or an Ironman triathlon champion.

In exploring everyday life and its intersections with death, this enduring collection of stories offers a naturalistic depiction of the working class in early twentieth-century Dublin. Joyce masterfully portrays frustrations and aborted desires to escape the mundane; transformative epiphanies both great and small; and the restraints, loneliness, violence, and contemplations of lives lived.

Stephen Dedalus is an Irish Catholic son in a pious Dublin family when he chooses to shed the constraints of religion, abandon his social and familial obligations, and escape the limits of his country to cultivate his life as a writer. In his autobiographical debut novel, James Joyce mirrors his own emotional and intellectual coming-of-age - from sexual awakening and upheavals of faith to fleeting epiphanies - in exploring the influences that help to shape an artistic identity.

For three young boys, Liam, Patrick, and Hugo, life in Ireland of the 1960s proves to be both idyllic and flawed. Living in close proximity but leading vastly different lives, the bonds of friendship bind these young men as they grow, dream, and navigate the storms of youth.

The day Adam Dunne's girlfriend, Sarah, fails to return from a Barcelona business trip, his perfect life begins to fall apart. Days later, the arrival of her passport and a note that reads "I'm sorry - S" sets off real alarm bells. He vows to do whatever it takes to find her. Adam is puzzled when he connects Sarah to a cruise ship called the Celebrate - and to a woman, Estelle, who disappeared from the same ship in eerily similar circumstances almost exactly a year before. To get answers, Adam must confront some difficult truths.

Achieve more with less effort: The secret to weight loss, fitness, and wellness lies in the most basic and most overlooked function of your body - how you breathe. One of the biggest obstacles to better health and fitness is a rarely identified problem: chronic overbreathing. We often take many more breaths than we need without realizing it, contributing to poor health and fitness, including a host of disorders, from anxiety and asthma to insomnia and heart problems.

Will Hurley was an attractive, charming, and impressive student at Dublin's elite St. John's College - and Ireland's most prolific serial killer. Having stalked his five young victims, he drowned them in the muddy waters of the Grand Canal. Sentenced to life imprisonment when he was just 19, Will is locked away in the city's Central Psychiatric Hospital.

From number-one New York Times best-selling author Nora Roberts comes a trilogy about the land we’re drawn to, the family we learn to cherish, and the people we long to love.… With the legends and lore of Ireland running through his blood, falconer Connor O’Dwyer is proud to call County Mayo home. It’s where his sister, Branna, lives and works, where his cousin, Iona, has found true love, and where his childhood friends form a circle that can’t be broken…. A circle that is about to be stretched out of shape - by a long-awaited kiss.

There's one must-have toy this Christmas, and Neala Clarke has told her niece Charli she'll get it for her. Never mind that she's got less than a week and it looks like everywhere is sold out. She's promised Charli a Fire Princess doll - and Neala is a woman of her word. Darcy Hart is a people-pleaser. So when his adorable six-year-old nephew, Dustin, asks for a particular doll at the last minute, he says yes. Luckily for Darcy, there's one left in stock at the local toy store.

The complete historical fantasy romance trilogy by Sharon Lynn Fisher. This collection includes The Absinthe Earl, The Raven Lady, and The Warrior Poet.

A wildly comic send-up of Irish literature and culture, At Swim-Two-Birds is the story of a young, lazy, and frequently drunk Irish college student who lives with his curmudgeonly uncle in Dublin. When not in bed (where he seems to spend most of his time) or reading, he is composing a mischief-filled novel about Dermot Trellis, a second-rate author whose characters ultimately rebel against him and seek vengeance. From drugging him as he sleeps to dropping the ceiling on his head, these figures of Irish myth make Trellis pay dearly for his bad writing.

In a city devastated by an epidemic, where survivors are all missing parts - an arm, a leg, an eye - Nell has always been an outsider. Her father is the famed scientist who created the biomechanical limbs that everyone now uses. But she's the only one with her machinery on the inside: her heart. Since the childhood operation, she has ticked. Like a clock, like a bomb. And as her community rebuilds, everyone is expected to contribute to the society's good, but how can Nell live up to her father's revolutionary ideas?

The body of a young woman is found by a river outside Belfast and Detective Sergeant Ryan McBride makes a heart-wrenching discovery at the scene, a discovery he chooses to hide even though it could cost him the investigation—and his career. The victim was a loner but well-liked. Why would someone want to harm her? And is her murder connected to a rapist who's stalking the local pubs? As Ryan untangles a web of deception and lies, his suspects die one by one, leading him to a dangerous family secret and a murderer who will stop at nothing to keep it.

Farming has been in John Connell's family for generations, but he never intended to follow in his father's footsteps. Until, one winter, after more than a decade away, he finds himself back on the farm. Connell records the hypnotic rhythm of the farming day - cleaning the barns, caring for the herd, tending to sickly lambs, helping the cows give birth. Alongside the routine events, there are the unforeseen moments when things go wrong: when a calf fails to thrive, when a sheep goes missing, when an argument between father and son erupts and things are said that cannot be unsaid.

Belfast, Northern Ireland: early spring 2017. Retired Chief Inspector Patrick Mullan is found brutally murdered in his bed. Detective Sergeant Ryan McBride and his partner Detective Sergeant Billy Lamont are called to his desolate country home to investigate. In their inquiry, they discover a man whose career with the police service of Northern Ireland was overshadowed by violence and corruption. Is the killer someone from Mullan's past, or his present? And who hated the man enough to kill him twice?

In 2008, Simon Fitzmaurice was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease. He was given four years to live. In 2010, in a state of lung-function collapse, Simon knew with crystal clarity that now was not his time to die. Against all prevailing medical opinion, he chose life. Despite the loss of almost all motor function, thanks to miraculous technology he has continued to work, help raise his children, and write this astonishing, life-affirming memoir.