In My Room by Jim Lucey (Gill & Macmillan, €16.99 / £13.99)
Knock for young readers
The Three Visitors: The Story of Knock by Eleanor Gormally (Vertias €5.99 / £5)
Memoir of an inspiring life
Donal’s Mountain: How One Son Inspired a Nation by Fionnbar Walsh (Hachette Books Ireland, €12.99/£10.99)
The Word of the Street
This brief little book is a simply presented book with one simple aim, to make the word of God accessible and meaningful in the daily lives of his readers. A Dominican since 1959, he has served in many roles abroad and in Ireland, but is currently at the Biblical Institute in Limerick, where he is…
When words can be very misleading
The World of Books
Hopeful words for the road forward
It ought to be said straight off that this is an excellent little book, which should prove to be both enlightening and heartening to those who read it. Donagh O’Shea OP is the director of the Dominican Retreat House in Tallaght. He the author of other books, such as Take Nothng for the Journey and…
I spy with my reader’s eye
Aimed an teenage readers weaned on video games and television, this is a spy novel for younger teenagers which moves from a conventional Dublin day school into the world of international espionage in which a group are given placements in The Planet Earthy Academy, which aims at training future protectors of the planet. Their first…
The new saints: their teachings and lives
Peter Costello examines the written legacies of the Pope saints
Saving a lost soul: scenes from Irish clerical life
Eamon Maher Generations of Irish students, myself included, had a novel by Francis MacManus as an optional text on the Leaving Certificate English syllabus. The Greatest of These was first published in Dublin just over 70 years ago, in 1943 by the Talbot Press. It presents a very sympathetic portrait of Bishop Ned Langton, who feels…
Germany calling Ireland
Joe Carroll People who listened to German Radio’s propaganda broadcasts to neutral Ireland during World War II must now be a small number. They began as a weekly talk in Irish but expanded to broadcasts in Irish and English, often using Francis Stuart (the novelist who was married to Sean MacBride’s half-sister Iseult) who was teaching…

Peter Costello