Politics/Current Affairs
As usual, the North dominates the year's political books and the Peace Process dominates the Northern books. In The Far Side of Revenge: Making Peace in Northern Ireland (The Collins Press) Irish Times journalist Deaglan de Breadun, who covered the events in Belfast during the period in question, goes behind the scenes to produce an account of the Peace Process, while An Irish Journal (Brandon), has selected articles from Gerry Adams's column in The Irish Voice. The Northern drugs trade and its links with well-known Dublin criminals is the subject of Jim McDowell's Godfathers! (Gill & Macmillan), and Enda Staunton's Northern Nationalists 1922-1969 (Columba Press) is likely to cause controversy with its claims that the Catholic population of Northern Ireland was put under Nazi protection in the 1930s, with the tacit approval of the Catholic Church.
We're all getting more than a little tired of the Celtic Tiger, and She Moves Through The Boom by Ann Marie Hourihane (Sitric Books) promises a quirky view of the changes behind the cliches while Irish Times journalist Colm Keena's Haughey's Millions, due from Gill & Macmillan in June, promises to be a lively account of the rise and rise of the man who always lived beyond his visible means. The contemporary childcare crisis is explored in Bernie Purcell's For Your Own Good: Who's Taking Care of the Children? (Collins Press), which may just prompt some parents to re-examine their childcare consciences; and in Dirty War, Clean Hands: The Dark Side of Spanish Democ- racy, Irish Times journalist Paddy Woodworth (Cork University Press) exposes the shocking absence of conscience in Spanish realpolitik.
Poetry
With a new collection of poems from Seamus Heaney due out across the water this year, it's a good time for The Poet's Album: A Bibliography of Seamus Heaney (The Gallery Press), which features a good deal of uncollected and unpublished material. The long-awaited Collected Poems by Michael Hartnett (The Gallery Press) will be joined by new Gallery Press collections from Eamon Grennan, Medbh McGuckian and Pearse Hutchinson. From Dedalus Press, meanwhile, come Desmond O'Grady's Songs of the Wandering Celt and Gregory O'Donoghue's Making Tracks.
Literary Criticism
The excitement will be palpable when the Field Day Anthology Volumes IV and V: Irish Women's Writing and Traditions (Cork University Press) makes its grand autumnal appearance. Ten years in preparation, it will offer a wide range of perspectives on women's writing and include many previously unpublished texts. Billed as even more radical and revelatory than its predecessors, it will almost certainly create the publishing stir of the year. In the meantime, some welcome additions to the lit-crit shelves will be The Collected Prose of James Clarence Mangan (Irish Academic Press), the first critical edition of Mangan's prose, Exile, Emigration and Irish Writing (Irish Academic Press), in which Patrick Ward analyses the concept of emigration as a theme in Irish literature, Dennis O'Driscoll's Selected Prose (The Gallery Press) and A Tour of the Darkling Plain: The Finnegans Wake Letters of Thornton Wilder and Adaline Glasheen edited by Edward M. Burns and Joshua A. Gaylord (University College Dublin Press).
Fiction
The Irish fictional world goes somewhat global this year, with Marie McGann's The Drawbridge (Brandon) exploring notions of identity and alienation among Irish and Polish communities in London, Lana Citron's Spilt Milk (Simon & Schuster/Townhouse) moving between Dublin and Chicago and Roger Derham's The Simurg and the Nightingale (Collins Press) telling the tale of a 17th-century barber-surgeon and free woman of the city of Dublin who is captured by Algerian pirates and spirited off to north Africa. The more familiar theme of growing up during the Troubles is given an edgy adolescent spin in Cris Sheerin's Chasing Shadows (Mercier Press), while in Snapshots by Jarlath Gregory (Lilliput Press/Sitric Books), a young gay man comes to terms with his sexuality in contemporary Crossmaglen. And in Talking to God by John F. McDonald (Wolfhound Press), a paranoid schizophrenic descends into madness. None of which is likely to impress Joseph O'Connor, if the final part of his Secret Male trilogy, The Last of the Irish Males (New Island Books) is as acerbic as its predecessors.
Pop Fiction/Thriller
Reckon your dancing days are over? Anne Marie Forrest's Dancing Days (Poolbeg) may make you change your mind as its heroine-of-a-certain age sallies forth on her motorbike to duet in a woodland glade with a handsome gardener. Poolbeg is once again doing some impressive sallying forth into the pop fiction market itself, with titles this year from Cathy Kelly, Patricia Scanlan, Marian Keyes and a host of others. Said and Done by Annie Sparrow (Town House and Country House) features a business trip with a difference as the wife goes off with the boss, while two sisters plus one man adds up to big trouble in A Tale of Two Sisters by Gabrielle Mullarkey (Town House and Country House). Irish-published thrillers are few and far between, but teenage suicide in Galway poses a puzzle for disgraced ex-cop Jack Taylor in Ken Bruen's The Guards (Brandon).
General
Terrific news for anyone allergic to housework: in Cleaning Yourself to Death (Newleaf/Gill & Macmillan), Pat Thomas explains how many of the products with which we scrub, scour and sweat are composed of deadly toxins and should be avoided like the plague. There's no avoiding Ireland's greatest cultural export, however, and Barra O'Cinneide's Riverdance: The Phenomenon (Blackhall Books) is a timely examination of that show's extraordinary international impact on traditional music and dance. In Irish Gardens: The Definitive Guide Shirley Lanigan (O'Brien Press) explores every patch worth visiting, from the celebrated to the secret, with illustrations and maps and colour photographs. Full colour photographs of the Dingle peninsula will be the order of the day from Dingle in Pictures by Steve McDonogh (Brandon); Ann O'Dowd Fogerty takes a common sense, holistic approach to wheat-free, gluten-free cooking in Eat With Joy (A & A Farmer); and Praying from the Margins (Columba Press) offers reflections and meditations on the gospels. Published under the pseudonym Glen O'Brien, this last should create quite a stir - it's written from a gay perspective.
Social History
The silent history of the Irish navvy is told in The Men Who Built Britain by Ultan Cowley (Wolfhound), a tribute to the hundreds of thousands of Irish men who helped construct Britain's canals, roads and railways; and the ever-increasing interest in Ireland's untold maritime history is reflected in The Sea Hound and The Story of the Helga/Muirchu by Daire Brunicardi (The Collins Press), a tale of derring-do which traces the chequered career of Ireland's first fishery patrol boat, from her shelling of Liberty Hall in 1916 to her demise off the Wexford coast. To see ourselves as others see us is an often-expressed wish, fulfilled in the pages of The Tourist's Gaze: Travellers to Ireland, 1800-2000, edited by Glenn Hooper (Cork University Press); and 5,000 years of Irish heritage is explored in Daithi O hOgain's Historic Ireland (Gill & Macmillan), with specially commissioned photographs to add to the text by one of Ireland's leading folklorists.
Biography/Memoir
It won't be out until September, but David Marcus's Oughtobiography: Leaves from the Diary of a Hyphenated Jew (Gill & Macmillan) will be one of the year's most eagerly awaited books: by all accounts, a vivid recreation of the journey which took him from a Jewish childhood in Cork to the centre of the Irish literary scene. Memories and more, undoubtedly, will be offered by Tim Robinson's My Time in Space, (Lilliput Press), which will touch on topics as diverse as problems in spatial mathematics and the relationships of colour fields on canvas.
Arts
Three colourful and contrasting volumes due from Gandon Editions this year are Carmel Mooney, a retrospective look at the artist known in Ireland and abroad for her volcano paintings; Dialogues: Irish Women Artists (with KT Press, London) edited by Katy Deepwell, 20 interviews with key Irish women artists in diverse media; and, to add fuel to the fiery debate about the merit of Irish architecture of the past half-century, The Architecture of Scott Tallon Walker 1960-2000, edited by John O'Regan. An illustrated biography of Pauline Bewick by James White is due in May from Wolfhound Press, and music will be under the spotlight in Fintan Vallely's Traditional Irish Music (Gill & Macmillan), which comes with a CD featuring a variety of top artists in the field.