DAVID BYERS
In 1792 the Harpers’ Meeting in Belfast was indeed an important event in the history and life of the town. Belfast’s reformers and radicals desired a better future, but they also shared an interest in the past. Through their support for the few surviving harpers, they hoped future generations might benefit from the survival of a tradition and an instrument, music, language, and practises that were all fast disappearing.
A week-to-view diary, this elegant and practical publication gathers extracts from twenty years of outstanding writing from Irish Pages (the island’s premier literary journal) and The Irish Pages Press. With an array of distinguished Irish and international authors, The 2025 Irish Pages Literary Diary is an essential holiday gift for readers, writers, and anyone interested in the life of the mind and the state of the world.
The Diary features classic texts by celebrated authors such as Kathleen Jamie, Susan Sontag, Patricia Craig, Slavenka Drakulić, Julia Kristeva and Chinua Achebe, as well as the remarkable work of emerging writers living in Ireland. The Diary includes quotations in English, Scots, Scots Gaelic and Irish, highlighting the linguistic range across Ireland and Britain.
GERARD McCARTHY
This is the first book of essays by a major new Irish non-fiction writer from the West of Ireland, comparable to the celebrated Kilkenny essayist Hubert Butler first published by The Lilliput Press and subsequently widely acclaimed. McCarthy’s writing is no less distinguished than Butler’s.
SLAVENKA DRAKULIĆ
Invisible Woman and Other Stories takes us on an intimate journey of ageing, from the shock of catching a glimpse of ourselves in the mirror as others see us to the actual slipping away of the self. The stories speak of reckonings: with the illness and death of a parent, with the emotional baggage that must be cleared out along with the material remains, with memories and missed opportunities, and with the waning of desire.
Shortlisted for the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development Literature Prize 2023.
SLAVENKA DRAKULIĆ
It is 1914, the eve of the First World War. Mileva Einstein has just arrived in Berlin with her two young sons to join her husband, the most celebrated scientist of the 20th century, Albert Einstein. He has finally found a university position worthy of his talents.
And then Mileva then receives a letter from him outlining “Conditions” he expects her to uphold in order to continue their relationship, and her already difficult life is completely upended.
IVANA SAJKO
The Story of a Man Who Collapsed Into His Notebook is about departures, childhood, the end of a relationship and the vanishing possibility in today’s world of fleeing to a better place. Written in the first person, each chapter a single sentence, the novel is an internal soliloquy of self-examination, an excavation of a life punctuated by upheaval and loss, hope and disillusionment, ambition and failure.
AVI SHLAIM
In this book Avi Shlaim places Israel’s policy towards the Gaza Strip under an uncompromising lens. He argues that recurrent attacks – what Israeli generals chillingly call “mowing the lawn” – are the inevitable result of Zionist settler colonialism whose basic objective is the elimination of the native population. In this war, however, Israel has gone beyond land-grabbing and ethnic cleansing to commit the crime of all crimes – genocide.
LUKA BEKAVAC
August After Midnight is a Croatian novel about memory, trauma and transcommunication: a triptych of different voices, weaving together historiography, speculative fiction and highly stylized prose.
DINO PEŠUT
Croatia’s Groundbreaking Gay Novel.
“I receive the news of my father’s grave illness with almost complete indifference. I’m finding it mildly annoying, like road construction… He called me just briefly; he doesn’t want to bother me too much. I’m at work right now. I hang up. I’m furious at my father’s potentially terminal illness. I work at the reception desk of an okay hotel… My job is not demanding—often it’s boring, but it keeps my curiosity alive. I especially like working the evening shifts and figuring out who is sleeping with whom. At night, I get to read a lot. Secretly, I write poetry.”
IGOR ŠTIKS
Igor Štiks’ fourth novel, mysteriously titled with only one letter, W, is his most elaborate so far – and definitely his most exciting – a feat of storytelling in which historic tragedies are woven through with humour and erotic passion.
IVANA ŠOJAT
The novel Unterstadt tells the story of an urban family of German origin living in Osijek from the end of the nineteenth till the end of the twentieth century. It is narrated through the portrayal of the destinies of four generations of women – a great grandmother, a grandmother, mother, and a daughter – their shattered illusions, the education of their children, the historical events that brutally lash out at them.
NEBOJŠA LUJANOVIĆ
When a fire at Zagreb’s Three Palms café tragically takes the life of the owner’s son, everyone joins the search for a culprit. And there can only be one: the young Roma man – Enis – employed as a waiter at the café.
PATRICIA CRAIG
This long-awaited selection of essays and reviews from one of Ireland’s leading critics brings together a wealth of reflection, observation and astute literary comment. It ranges in time from William Carleton to Edna O’Brien, and in subject matter from recent Irish poetry to ghosts, children’s books and MI5.
MADDY TONGUE, with Michael and Sarah Longley & Chris Agee
Maddy Tongue’s heartfelt portrait of the dancer and teacher Helen Lewis, who survived Auschwitz to teach dance in Belfast.
A hardback reprint of the classic Irish Pages issue on Seamus Heaney to commemorate the tenth anniversary of his death on 30 August 2013. “So many people in Ireland and overseas read, admired, and watched him. The extraordinary degree to which Heaney was a creative and ethical exemplar, shaper, mentor, influence, and generous friend for his fellow poets and writers comes through especially powerfully in this book, with its 54 contributors from Ireland, Britain, the United States and further afield…” Includes four last poems by Seamus Heaney.
MARK COUSINS
In this wide-ranging, stylish and iconoclastic book, Cousins reflects on his prolific career in filmmaking, meditating on the actors, directors, films, writers and philosophers that have influenced him, as well as on other adventures in filmland and on creativity in general.
