"From one of the most engaging and brilliant writers of our time comes a collection of essays about growing up in Ireland during radical change; about cancer, priests, popes, homosexuality, and literature"--

Discusses the background and development of the conflict between the Irish Republican Army fighting for the Catholics in Ireland and the British government forces supporting the Irish Protestants.

In 1950's Boston, the Irish Republican Army is running guns and killing witnesses. Cal and Dante are committed to stopping them. When a body is discovered at the Charlestown locks--tarred, feathered and shot to death--it appears to be a gangland killing, and is almost immediately dismissed. However, Cal O'Brien's cousin, Boston PD detective Owen Lackey, recognizes the murder style as the typical retribution for IRA informers. Combined with a tip-off...

"When Seán Hewitt meets Elias, the two fall headlong into a love story. But as Elias struggles with severe mental illness, they soon come face-to-face with crisis. All Down Darkness Wide is a perceptive and unflinching meditation on the burden of living in a world that too often sets happiness and queer life at odds, and a tender and honest portrayal of what it's like to be caught in the undertow of a loved one's deep depression. As lives are made...

"The fifth of eight children, Chris Forhan was born into a family of silence. His mother and father often sat in the same room but exchanged no words. He and his siblings learned, without being told, that certain thoughts and feelings were not to be shared. On the evenings his father didn't come home, the rest of the family would eat dinner without him, his whereabouts unknown, his absence pronounced but unspoken. And on a cold night just before Christmas...

In 1854 eleven-year-old Bones is a slave in Virginia who sends a bottle holding her real name and a trinket from her long-lost father down the James River--the currents carry it far away, ultimately uniting the lives of three young girls.

"Nine years ago, the bloody conflict in Northern Ireland tore apart two young lovers ... Now, in 1983, Davy McCutcheon and Fiona Kavanagh find themselves worlds apart. Davy, once a bomb-maker for the Provisional IRA, is serving a twenty-five-year sentence in a British prison. Having seen enough of death and violence, he wants nothing more to do with the struggle that cost him his freedom and his love. But old loyalties die hard and, despite himself,...