Said the Dead is a book that was born in the archive. It grew from hundreds of hours spent studying a series of casebooks that had been rescued from the cellars of a derelict hospital nearby. By the time I happened to find these books in the archive, they were over a century old and incredibly fragile, their pages brittle and crumbling – but inside, another world was alive. I began with casebooks from the 1890s and slowly read my way towards the 1920s. Many of the books were printed with the name of the institution, ‘Cork District Lunatic Asylum’, a title I could never get used to, always flinching at the word ‘lunatic’, so abrasive to the …
Category: Irish History
I simply cannot imagine a life without ladies’ Gaelic football. I first started playing Gaelic football at eleven and when I think back on my teens and early adulthood, so …
Claire Wills shares a piece with us on her new read Missing Persons or My Grandmother’s Secret. You know that feeling that there’s something you are not in on? We …
Fin Dwyer tell us about his book A Lethal Legacy… Murder provides a unique insight into the past. In the aftermath of homicide, history tends to slow down. The victim …
Peig McManus shares an extract from her memoir, I Will Be Good Mam said it was cold the day she brought me home to our tenement room on North King …
Sheila O’ Flanagan, briefly tells us about her first historical novel, The Woman On The Bridge. The story of a young woman caught up in Ireland’s fight for freedom. The …
It’s that time of the year once again! It means only one thing for our bookseller, Karina, from our Rathmines shop: the annual #ReadIrishWomenChallenge23, and we at Dubray are delighted …
Imbolc (or Imbolg); the first day of spring in Ireland! Imbolc also marks the publication of this wonderful new memoir In Ordinary Time by Carmel McMahon. While this is the …
Our Bad Bridget book emerged from our research over many years in many different archives and libraries in North America. It tells the story of the Irish migration experience through …
Small Things Like These by Irish author Claire Keegan is one of the six-strong shortlisted books for the Booker Prize 2022. There are various reasons as to why this belongs …
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