The Lilliput Press Ltd

‘As I study the birds, animals and plants around me, I cannot help but see the patterns all living things seem driven to create.’ Declan Murphy’s first encounter with a kingfisher as a young boy was unforgettable. Returning to the rivers years later, he embarks on a quest to study this most brightly-coloured bird during its nesting season, a seemingly straightforward challenge. But the river is slow to reveal the habits and secrets of its residents.

The Great Spotted Woodpecker first bred in Ireland in 2009. Since then the author has followed the daily lives of this species, a family of whom had taken up residence in a wind-torn Spanish chestnut tree near his home in the depths of County Wicklow.

Birgit, a young Scandinavian woman, moves to a small island off the coast of Ireland to recover from a suffocating relationship. She meets Geoff, a recovering alcoholic who is mourning the death of his wife. Their stories intertwine, offering the possibility of renewal through redemptive love.

A memoir like no other, passionate, intelligent and revealing of both the age and the individual.

Dublin 7 is a journey through one of Dublin's largest and most colourful postal districts.

At the height of the Irish famine, Asenath Nicholson began a one-woman relief operation in Dublin; a soup-kitchen, visits to homes of the poor and distributing bread in the streets. Similtaneously she wished to "bring the Bible to the poor". She wrote an eye-witness account of the events.

First published in Irish by An Gum in 1965, Seosamh Mac Grianna's magnificent autobiographical novel Mo Bhealach Fein is translated here for the first time into English by Micheal O hAodha. With notes of Dead as Doornails and The Ginger Man in its absurd comedy, Mac Grianna pens his reaction to an anglicised, urbanised, post-revolution Ireland.

In his memoir, A Life in Medicine: From Aesculapius to Beckett, Eoin O’Brien, a cardiologist with an international reputation as a clinical scientist, describes his life in medicine and literature.

PEGGY O'BRIEN grew up in western Massachusetts, where she now lives with her husband. She teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

'Writing with authority and verve, Robert O'Byrne has plumbed a rich vein of social history and connoisseurship, to draw a striking portrait of a complex, brilliant and contradictory personality.' R. F. FOSTER

Left without a Handkerchief contains ten stories of destruction and loss during the Irish War of Independence and Civil War.

O'Connor's translations spring from a nearly compulsive desire to breathe life into Ireland's past, to 'look back to look forward,' as he once put it.