Irish Ears are Smiling
A wee lot of stories you might fancy if a bit of the ol' Irish brogue is music to ya ears. Enjoy this mix of fresh and aged audiobooks that will bring you a taste of home (if your home is Ireland).
The Sea
By John Banville
Narrated by: John Lee
Length: 6 hours 49 minutes
The author of The Untouchable (“contemporary fiction gets no better than this”—Patrick McGrath, The New York Times Book Review) now gives us a luminous novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory.The narrator is Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who, soon after his wife’s death, has gone back to the seaside town where he spent... Read more »
Angela's Ashes
By Frank McCourt
Narrated by: Frank McCourt
Length: 15 hours 8 minutes
A Pulitzer Prize–winning, #1 New York Times bestseller, Angela’s Ashes is Frank McCourt’s masterful memoir of his childhood in Ireland.
“When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is... Read more »
When All Is Said
A Novel
By Anne Griffin
Narrated by: Niall Buggy
Length: 8 hours 4 minutes
When All Is Said
“Dark and unflinching yet packed with heart and humanity, When All Is Said is Irish storytelling at its best. Maurice Hannigan sits in a bar on a Saturday night and toasts five people who have been important in his life and who have left him, either through death or distance. The 84-year-old widower spools out his story like tangled fishing line, raising one glass to each of his departed loved ones. It all leads up to a startling yet inevitable end to an unsettling yet satisfying story.”
Grace Harper, Mac's Back-Books
Ulysses
By James Joyce
Narrated by: Donal Donnelly & Miriam Healy-Louie
Length: 27 hours 15 minutes
The young poet Stephen has been recalled from Paris to Dublin to be at his mother's deathbed. But he refuses her dying wishes: to kneel and pray for her. Now, holed up in his Martello tower outside the city walls, he has to suffer the taunts of Buck Mulligan by day and, by night, the vision of 'her eyes, shaking out of death to shake and bend my... Read more »
Country Girl
A Memoir
By Edna O'Brien
Narrated by: Edna O'Brien
Length: 13 hours 32 minutes
"Country Girl is Edna O'Brien's exquisite account of her dashing, barrier-busting, up-and-down life."-National Public Radio
When Edna O'Brien's first novel, The Country Girls, was published in 1960, it so scandalized the O'Briens' local parish that the book was burned by its priest. O'Brien was undeterred and has since created a body of work... Read more »
Brooklyn
A Novel
By Colm Toibin
Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
Length: 7 hours 38 minutes
Colm Tóibín’s New York Times bestselling novel—now an acclaimed film starring Saoirse Ronan and Jim Broadbent nominated for four Academy Awards including Best Picture—is “a moving, deeply satisfying read” (Entertainment Weekly) about a young Irish immigrant in Brooklyn in the early 1950s.
“One of the most unforgettable characters in contemporary... Read more »
Conversations with Friends
A Novel
By Sally Rooney
Narrated by: Aoife McMahon
Length: 8 hours 20 minutes
A sharply intelligent novel about friendship, lust, jealousy, and the unexpected complications of adulthood in the 21st century
Frances is a cool-headed and darkly observant young woman, vaguely pursuing a career in writing while studying in Dublin. Her best friend and comrade-in-arms is the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi. At a... Read more »
Milkman
By Anna Burns
Narrated by: Bríd Brennan
Length: 14 hours 11 minutes
Milkman
“The unnamed protagonist of MILKMAN stands out for the wrong reasons. She reads while walking, for one; she's been taking French night classes downtown; and she goes running by herself through the streets of her unnamed city under the control of an unnamed government and filled with the violence of an unnamed civil conflict. Then, when a local paramilitary named Milkman begins pursuing her, she suddenly becomes "interesting," the last thing she ever wanted to be. Set amidst the Troubles in Northern Ireland, MILKMAN is a relentless, incisive, claustrophobic, and darkly funny book about the power of gossip, rumor, insinuation, and how to carry on in a community where the wrong flag, the wrong religion, or even a sunset can be subversive and dangerous. Because MILKMAN is written in such a breathless torrent of language, the audiobook and its reader (with her fabulous Irish accent) taps into the conversational and emotional cadence of its narrator so well I couldn't stop listening.”
Rebecca, One More Page
The Witch Elm
A Novel
By Tana French
Narrated by: Paul Nugent
Length: 22 hours 6 minutes
The Witch Elm
“A burglary gone awry, a near-perfect life destroyed, a mind torn. Toby is caring for his dying uncle and finding himself again. When a skull is found in the wych elm, it seems that a decades-old murder may tear apart a family and Toby himself, as he tries to piece together what happened—and what he might have done. A haunting novel portrayed by a narrator unreliable to himself.”
Jocelyn, Bookshop Santa Cruz