Why does Alfredo keep telling stories? He has a story and a title for all occasions of his experience: A Jew in Tunisia, The Bloomsday Blackout. . . but the Hollywood Moguls are not interested in Alfredo's stories; so he writes a masterpiece for the theatre about the last night on earth of James Joyce. This is an Irish novel set in Los Angeles. It tells the story of Alfredo Hunter, a depressive Jewish/Irish playwright who is in Hollywood to make a killing in the film business. We also meet the unknown narrator, who observes Alfredo's various fluctuations and swings of mood and humour. Humour...

In 1966, just two weeks after the IRA blew up Nelson's Pillar in O'Connell Street Dublin, Eddie McGrath is knocked down and killed by the airport bus near the spot where the Pillar used to stand. His death makes his seventeen year old daughter, Nuala, an orphan. She never knew her mother, Gertie, at all, and when she looks into her father's things she finds items of her mother that deeply disturb her. Set in Dublin, Sligo and Donegal, 'Who Was Gertie Ford?' will introduce the reader to the west coast of Ireland, as Nuala searches for Gertie in a world of adventure, heartbreak and tragedy.

All billboards in New Orleans in the fall of 2005 were underperforming; if not rendered absurd or irrelevant by catastrophe, erased by the hurricane to blither like old TV screens tuned to grey noise. Many would stay that way for months and years as advertisers had no interest targeting a much depopulated city beset and preoccupied with basic concerns. Closer to the ground, language sprouted. Ugly mass produced plastic signs advertising recovery services proliferated and many took matters into their own hands: with a can of spray paint, shard of plywood and a useful service to proclaim, a...