Two lonely people, a chance meeting at an adult education class, an almost instant attraction. But why do they keep misunderstanding each other, missing each other? What is it that conspires to keep Jessie and Patrick apart? This is an urban romance with a difference; a tale of mortals acted by i...
J.J. Liddy, the main character of Kate Thompson’s novel The New Policeman, has a problem: there never seems to be enough time in the day. In fact, there seems to be decidedly less time. With barely enough hours in the day for school and his music, J.J. has no time left over to contemplate the sho...
Christie has a brother who is, if people put it kindly, "different." But, as Christie says in the first chapter, only two people know what's really up with him: his father, who doesn't believe it, and his mother, who does. Danny sets off after his mother, and Christie gets dragged with at a time ...
Wow. I am seriously delighted and impressed with this book. While it has some concepts in it that weren't exactly aligned with my own thought processes, and while it introduced some other concepts that were surprising, even when they made perfect sense once you had them introduced to you, it was ...
The second book in the Switchers trilogy, this book begins a few months after the first one ended. Tess is glad Kevin survived by turning himself into a phoenix, but she's having second thoughts about his new form when he's captured by the zoo and sold to a private collector. With only a week bef...
In Rilka's village, it isn't safe to go out after dark. That's when the beguilers drift through the streets, as bright and visible as fireflies. Everyone knows their power-they hypnotize their victims and, in the end, lead them to their deaths. When Rilka declares her Great Intention to capture a...
I'd been through it enough times. My ma was too far away to come in and I didn't give them Carmel's number. She was always giving out about me to my ma, and she'd be delighted to see me in here. But they weren't allowed to interview me without an adult there so they had to bring in a social worke...
It was taking a lot longer this time for the sentry to come back, and Pup hoped that nothing was going wrong inside. Eventually they heard his footsteps. The panel opened and a piece of paper was shoved through it. Mooney took it and squatted on his heels, creating a shelter with his body to enab...
‘Oh,’ she said, rubbing sleep from her eyes. ‘It’s you. How weird. We shouldn’t really have done that, should we?’ ‘I’m glad we did,’ he told her. ‘It has made me a very happy man.’ ‘But it was a drunken and irresponsible thing to do.’ ‘You might have been drunk. I wasn’t.’ ‘It was still irrespon...
Río had made tea and was sipping it without tasting it, wishing it was laced with alcohol. She thought of all that surplus champagne, languishing in Coral Mansion. All those revellers in O’Toole’s, toasting an absent bride and groom with forced cheer. The cake she had cobbled together from Mr Kip...
You wouldn’t know about that, though, would you, sir? Fine tall gentleman like yourself. But it’s true. One good thing is that people often mistake me for being much younger than I am, and that makes them take pity on me. Especially the women, the ones that have their own children at home. And es...
‘Out!’ Jack yelled at them. ‘I want you all out, now!’ Any of them that dared to ask questions were ignored or berated. Within minutes the house and buildings were empty and Jack was alone in the house that had once belonged, still belonged, to one of the only people in his life who had befriende...
“Now that Consul Incitatus is here, we can continue with the proceedings at hand,” he said. The senators broke up their makeshift corridor and took seats in a semicircle around the other consul and Claudius, who was still asleep and gently snoring. I realized that Incitatus was standing with his ...
Each time he failed he retreated and tried a different shape: a beetle, a snake, a mouse. But as soon as he got anywhere near the entrance he turned back into the porker and got stymied again. While she watched him, Tess reflected on what she had learnt. It seemed that Lizzie was right yet again,...
No one was there, so I slipped in and went to the room I shared with Lenko. I was shocked to discover that all my things had already been cleared out, and for a long time I stood staring at my empty corner, unwilling to believe what I was seeing. Until then, I suppose that it had all seemed like ...
I was a jumble of emotion, a bit elated, a bit scared, and full of proud admiration for Maggie and for Sandy, who had acted so bravely that night. But as my excitement began to settle I found that underneath it all, my resolutions were intact. I still wanted answers. I still wanted to go home. I ...
Jean and Frank took turns to sleep in the transom. Michael and Annie sat side by side in the double passenger seat. He ached to put his arm around her, take her head and all its sorrows on to his shoulder. In the end it was he who nodded off and slumped towards her, and woke when the lorry bumped...
Have you see Aine?’ It was like a nightmare repetition of the previous day. Brigid went off without waiting for an answer and Joseph heard his father’s voice downstairs calling for Aine. He got up quickly, still in yesterday’s clothes, and went out on to the landing. By the time he got there the ...
Aisling and Aidan went off in the car to do the weekly supermarket shop, and J.J. went back to work on the fiddles. As soon as he was sure that the coast was clear, Donal got out the Golden Pages and began hunting. There was no listing under “Helicopters,” but when he looked it up in the index at...
That was how she came to be in her studio on the morning of the twenty-second, when the news first came through on the radio. She rang us straight away. I was woken by the call, and heard Dad galumphing down the stairs. I thought it was probably mad Mr Davenport, who often phoned at unsociable ho...