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: Literature
Saoirse is the story of a young American woman who flees to Ireland to escape the troubles she left behind in Michigan. Travelling under a stolen identity, she boards a plane planning …
Dear lovely Dubray readers, First of all thank you for your patience. It has been three long years since Strange Sally Diamond was published and I’m sure you must have …
I began my writing life with novels and plays and had success with three books, Priest, The Trouble with Sarah Gullion, and Bird in the Snow, and 6 plays produced …
The art of discovering a favourite book by Jessica Harrison, Publishing Director of Penguin Classics. How do you choose a favourite book? Is it the novel you discovered as a …
Test Kitchen is a darkly funny and often macabre story about the culture of food, of dining and eating, about feeding and nourishing, about mothers, mortality and magic. Stories are …
Here is a fantastic piece by Sinéad Gleeson for her fiction debut, Hagstone. Taking readers to the darker side of human nature and the mysteries of faith and the natural …
Sometime in the late 1990s, I read Herman Hesse’s 1927 novel Steppenwolf and was awed by a passage that prophesied the great destruction coming to Europe. Harry Haller, that book’s …
Nearly fifteen years ago, a man was found dead on a beach in the north-west of Ireland. Nobody knew who he was or where he had come from. The man …
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