Dermot Bolger

Seven of Ireland's most acclaimed writers, including Roddy Doyle, Colm Toibin, and Joseph O'Connor, join talents to recount the last wild and disreputable night of a once proud Dublin hotel that has definitely seen much better times

Finbar's Hotel

When Francis Hanrahan, the shy child of grey suburbia meets Shay, an older, wilder image of himself, he is cast out into the night-time world of Dublin. This is the story of a young boy's struggle towards maturity, set against a shocking image of Ireland, a tough urban landscape not a rural Eden.

The Journey Home

The Family on Paradise Pier

Over the past 20 years, an explosion of contemporary Irish writing has forced its way onto the literary scene. This book contains Irish fiction published since 1968, arranged in the chronological order of the period in which the work is set.

The New Picador Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction

This novel evokes the traditions and history of rural Ireland and the contrasting contemporary life in Dublin and London.

Father's Music

Draws only on Irish fiction published since 1970.

The Picador Book of Irish Contemporary Fiction

Irish Writers Abroad

Ireland in Exile

Night Shift

‘The Journey Home’ is the story of a young boy’s struggle towards maturity, set against a shocking portrait of Ireland: a tough urban landscape, not a rural Eden.

The New Dubliners : a Journey Through Unofficial Dublin

Invisible Cities

In 1994 the Dublin novelist and playwright Dermot Bolger was commissioned to adapt the novel Ulysses for the stage as the centerpiece of Philadelphia's celebration of the 90th Bloomsday. A Dublin Bloom is the text of that commission, a dramatic and brilliant re-imagining of Joyce's world in theatrical terms.... A fresh and vigorous work of art. -- Fintan O'Toole.

An Original Free Adaptation of James Joyce's Ulysses

A Dublin Bloom

The lament for Arthur Cleary: transposes an old story of love and death to modern-day Dublin. When Arthur Cleary returns to Dublin, the city of his youth, he feels lost in the same streets he grew up in. The new Dublin, the Dublin of the 1980s, is damaged by unemployment and heroin.

A Dublin Quartet

Temptation

A widow spends weeks haunting a cemetery, desperate to track down an unknown woman who keeps leaving flowers on her husband's grave; A daughter searches a foreign city for her father, trying to understand why he disappeared forty-five years ago; A former gay lover of Roger Casement stands among the crowds at his state funeral in 1965, paying silent homage to the closeted world they were forced to inhabit at the dawning of the Irish State. A writer at a book launch comes face to face with the person secretly responsible for his success. In his first collection of short stories, Dermot Bolger peers under the veneer of our lives, exploring the secrets that bind families together, or tear them apart, creating worlds where people find that nothing is truly certain. There are always truths just beyond reach that would make sense of their lives, if they only know how to unlock them.

Secrets Never Told

Wexford Through Its Writers

Restored to life - to a miraculous second chance at life - Sean experiences the numbed, haunted sensation of not knowing who he is. He realises that until he searches out and unlocks the past, he will be a stranger to his wife, his children, and to himself.

A Renewed Novel

A Second Life

Young Francis Hanrahan dreams desperately of a life different from that of his country-born, suburban-living parents. On his first day at his first job Francis makes his first real friend. Shay, a would-be older brother, introduces “Hano” to Dublin's appealingly seedy after-hours bars and drug-fueled parties. They are joined by Cait, a troubled teenager who spends her days in a stupor. But the noir thrills of underground Dublin cannot conceal the unemployment, corruption, and violence strangling the city. The Plunkett brothers, masters of “the subtle everyday corruption on which a dynasty was built” will use the friends—with tragic results. Torn between his friends, his family, and his own ideals, Hano ultimately falls victim to these powerful forces and commits a heinous crime. He flees through the countryside with Cait, wondering, as he narrates the events that set him on this path, if there is a home at the end of it. Controversial for its gritty portrait of Dublin in the 1980s, The Journey Home is Dermot Bolger's unflinching look at the personal cost of social progress, and those, innocent or not, lost during the journey.

Bolger's spellbinding novel is based on a real-life rescue in 1943, when the MV Kerlogue's crew risked their lives to save 168 drowning German sailors. The story is seen through the eyes of Jack, a boy who followed his father to sea, and finds himself rescuing the men who killed his dad. This is a brilliant portrayal of the unarmed Irish ships that sailed alone through hazardous waters, of young romance, and of a boy encountering a world where every experience is intense and dangerous.

Dermot Bolger

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