Synge was born into an evangelical Protestant world that was increasingly at odds with the mainstream of Irish society. He himself became an agnostic and a Darwinian at an early age. Nonetheless he retained an interest in the occult and the mystical that was to stand him in good stead as a writer. Additionally, Synge was intensely musical. Indeed, his original intention was to make a career as a professional musician and he studied in Germany to that end. In time, he abandoned music for literature, but his greatest plays sing with a unique musical language quite unlike the work of any other dramatist. He was a passionate man, one who watched everything, missed nothing, and assembled apparently insignificant details into building blocks of great art. His three great plays, In the Shadow of the Glen, Riders to the Sea, and The Playboy of the Western World, established modern Irish drama and gave it its central position in the Irish literary revival. But the author of these remarkable works was a dying man. For years Synge had battled Hodgkin's disease and in 1909 he succumbed to it at the age of thirty-eight. This outstanding biography, written with great verve and assurance, will reestablish Synge in the hearts of a new generation.

John Millington Synge: A Biography

Literature & Fiction

Kiely, David M.

Dramas & Plays

St Martins Pr

Blade Macken, a weathered Irish cop, investigates the explosion of a car bomb in Dublin that kills dozens of people, attempting to find the man claiming responsibility for their deaths

The Angel Tapes: A Blade Macken Mystery

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Mystery

John Millington Synge: A biography

Gill Macmillan Ltd

Bloody women: Ireland's female killers

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Dublin: Gill & Macmillan

First published in 1999, Bloody Women was a runaway success. The book tells the stories of seventeen Irish murders, all committed by women. Some are notorious, some less well known: all reveal that the dark forces which drive men to murder are fully shared by women. Murder by a female hand can be just as brutal as by a man's. Bloody Women contains drownings, shootings stabbing and savage clubbings - as well as highlighting the ingenious methods by which some of Ireland's female killers disposed of their victims' corpses. Here are women who murdered their lovers; or who murdered relations in dispute over land and inheritance; here is Mamie Cadden, the Hume Street abortionist; Jane O'Brien from County Wexford who shot her own newphew in order to get possession of a farm; and Hannah O'Leary who killed and dismembered one of her elder brothers in County Cork. With murder sites from London to Donegal, from Down to Limerick, Bloody Women is a chilling and unforgettable read. Already a bestseller, Bloody Women returns to the shelves with an attractive new cover.

Bloody Women: Ireland's Female Killers

Eyeless in Cooley: A Blade Macken Crime Thriller

Parsifal Press

More Bloody Women

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Poolbeg Press Ltd.

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Books by Kiely, David M.