Showing results by narrator "Aoife McMahon " in All Categories

Life is in two parts: who you were before you met her and who you are after. A documentary crew discover a mysterious young woman living alone in the mountains of West Cork. Strikingly beautiful, she has an extraordinary talent for mimicry, like the famous Australian lyrebird. The crew, fascinated, make her the subject of their story and bestow the nickname upon her. When they leave, they take Lyrebird with them back to the city.

As the smell of pinecones and cinnamon fill the air and the plump turkey roasts in the oven, the final preparations for Christmas day have begun just as they do every year. The tree lights are twinkling and the mince pies are cooked and there is just one final tradition to carry out before the Christmas magic can begin. This year though, something is different and it's time for life-long traditions to change.

An elderly gentleman checks into a B&B in a small village in rural Ireland where he knows nobody. Four days later, his body is found in the lake. The identity of their unknown guest raises questions for one family in particular, twin sisters Liv and Marianne, and their mother, Ethel, each of whom is searching for her own place in the world. The Ghostlights brilliantly evokes the lives of the people in the town and explores the aftershocks of a stranger’s tragedy.

1958: In a small town like Athenry, people talk. Everyone’s noticed that the injury which stopped Annie Fagan’s father from working doesn’t prevent him from hitting his wife. But a man’s home is his castle, and no one is going to intervene. Until Annie runs into Arthur ‘Sketch’ Talbot. Sketch is determined to help Annie, and the two soon fall in love. But Annie’s father won’t give his daughter up lightly, and Sketch’s attempts to save her will have devastating consequences....

Amanda King and Tess Cuffe are strangers who share the same Georgian house, but their lives couldn't be more different. Amanda seems to have it all, absolute perfection. She projects all the accoutrements of a lady who lunches. Sadly, the reality is a soulless home, an unfaithful husband and a very lonely heart. By comparison, in the basement flat, unwanted tenant Tess has spent a lifetime hiding and shutting her heart to love. It takes a bossy doctor, a handsome gardener, a pushy teenager and an abandoned cat to show these two women that sometimes letting go is the first step to moving forward and new friendships can come from the most unlikely situations.

Exciting stories, extraordinary creatures, and compelling gods, goddesses, and heroes come together in this compendium of Norse myths - first told long ago by the Vikings. Hear about Thor, the god of thunder, and how he once disguised himself as a bride to seek revenge on a giant and retrieve his powerful hammer - Mjölnir - and how Sif, the goddess of fertility, had her long golden hair cut off by Loki, the trickster god. Each myth is told with thrilling immediacy, in language that is easy for children to understand, while retaining the awe and intrigue of the original tales.

Esme has run the guest house for as long as anyone in Ballycove can remember. But in her declining years, her sight is failing, and when she has a fall on the eve of the summer season, she is forced to take a back seat for the first time in her life. From her chair in the entry hall, not much passes Esme by. There's Cora, the wife visiting indefinitely... without her husband; Niamh, the city professional with a life-changing decision to make; and Phyllie, the grandmother whose family is slipping away from her.

On a Dublin city street, packed with afternoon Christmas shoppers, a young woman appears, naked, traumatised and bearing burn marks. Tom Reynolds, now chief superintendent, is no longer head of the murder squad. But when it transpires the woman escaped from a house fire started deliberately and that there are more victims, including a baby, Tom is sucked in. What begins as a straightforward case of arson, soon becomes something much more sinister. The people in that house never wanted to be there in the first place. Now more of them are missing.

Reporter Sally Hayden was at home in London when she received a message on Facebook: “Hi sister Sally, we need your help.” The sender identified himself as an Eritrean refugee who had been held in a Libyan detention center for months, locked in one big hall with hundreds of others. From this single message begins a staggering account of the migrant crisis across North Africa. With unprecedented access, Hayden’s book is based on interviews with hundreds of refugees and migrants who tried to reach Europe and found themselves stuck in Libya.

A tragic accident leaves the tight-knit book club in the small seaside town of Fairweather reeling. Then stranger Tom McLysaght arrives in the community, and the members of the club find their lives changing in ways they never could have imagined. None of them realise that Tom is hiding a secret. On the surface, his move to Fairweather was to escape his highflying life in London and to put some much-needed distance between him and his ex-fiancée - but deep down Tom knows that there are some things he cannot run from.

After months of training, former Long Island homicide detective Maggie D'arcy is now officially a Garda. She's finally settling into life in Ireland, and so is her teenage daughter, Lilly. Maggie may not be a detective yet, but she's happy with her community policing assignment in Dublin's Portobello neighborhood.

Dublin 1996. Joan Egan lives an enviable life. She and her husband, Martin, and daughter, Carmel, are thriving in Dublin at the dawn of an economic boom. But everything changes when Joan receives a letter from Emma, the daughter who she and Martin gave up for adoption thirty years before, asking for a life-or-death favor.

Joyce Conway remembers things she shouldn't. She knows about tiny cobbled streets in Paris, which she has never visited. And every night she dreams about an unknown little girl with blonde hair.

Southampton, 1912. Jessie is made from tough stuff. At just 19, after the death of her father, she opted not to follow her mother back to Ireland, preferring instead to take charge of her own destiny. When Jessie marries an Irishman and takes over the running of the cafe she works in, it seems as though all the pieces are coming together. But when destiny and a pushy local businessman have other ideas, everything she has worked for is taken away, bit by bit. Will she find the strength to keep fighting for the life she wants in the face of personal loss, gang bosses and embezzlement?

Sid wears her independence like armour. So when she strikes up a rare connection with unlucky-in-love Finn, they are both determined to prove that men and women can just be friends. Marin has the perfect home, attentive husband, two beloved children - and a secret addiction to designer clothes. She knows she has it all, so why can't she stop comparing herself to other women? Bea believes that we all have one love story - and she's had hers. Now her life centres around her son, Luke, and her support group of fierce single women. But there's something that she can't tell anyone.

Kieran O'Regan was responsible for hunting down killers. Now he's become one of the dead: his decapitated body has been found in a graveyard, a tin whistle stuffed into his throat. O'Regan was due to give evidence at a trial for police corruption. His gruesome murder sends a clear message to whistleblowers: only silence is safe. DCI Katie Maguire is determined to uncover the truth. But corruption in the Garda stretches back decades. As more officers are horrifically silenced, Katie must decide whom she can trust....

Things are finally looking up for Anna. Fourteen miserable years of marriage to man-child Connor have left her drained and ready for a new start. So when they separate, she couldn't be more thrilled to move in with James, a handsome lecturer who is everything her ex-husband is not: kind, thoughtful and above all, reliable. But Anna and James' kids hate living with the loved-up couple and the new set-up. Their teenage daughters—one a studious high achiever and the other a cool rich girl unbothered by grades or exams—have nothing in common.

Behind the gates of Temple Alice, the aristocratic Anglo-Irish St Charles family sinks into a state of decaying grace. To Aroon St Charles, large and unlovely daughter of the house, the fierce forces of sex, money, jealousy and love seem locked out by the ritual patterns of good behaviour. But crumbling codes of conduct cannot hope to save the members of the St Charles family from their own unruly and inadmissible desires. This elegant and allusive novel established Molly Keane as the natural successor to Jean Rhys.

Abbey Andersen is the last person to go looking for change. Yes, it's tough that she barely sees her mother these days - but in San Francisco she has great friends, a steady relationship and a job she enjoys. When Abbey is contacted by Irish lawyer Ryan Gilligan, she learns in an instant everything she believed about her roots is a lie. She must travel to Dublin to find out more - but she's scarcely off the plane when she's plunged into a new crisis. One that will change everything not just for Abbey but for the family in Ireland who had no idea that she even existed.

It’s 1849 on the west coast of Ireland. Resilient Honora O’Donoghue is accustomed to fending for herself and to reading the language of the natural world. It was always said she’d been marked for something different, but it’s not until she suffers devastating losses in a country gripped by the Famine that Honora begins to understand how that difference will save her. With the hope of a better life in America calling, Honora keeps moving toward her freedom.