Showing results by narrator "Aoife McMahon" in All Categories

An exclusive short story for World Book Day from one of our best-selling authors.... Sometimes all we need is a relaxing holiday in the sun. For Anthony and Carole, a week in a lovely Greek hotel has helped them mend the cracks in their marriage. For widowed Jessica, it’s the longest she’s ever gone without visiting her beloved husband’s grave. However when the flight doesn’t go according to plan, they are each forced to face up to the very things they have been avoiding for so long.

In Blarney, Cork, an old millworker's cottage guards its secrets. In 1921 a mother, father and their two young children disappeared from this house. And now, 95 years later, their mummified bodies have been discovered under the floorboards. As DS Katie Maguire investigates, the flames of old family rivalries flare up once more...and Katie is caught in the crossfire.

Being held hostage at gunpoint by her childhood friend is not Dr Heather Gilmore's idea of a good day at work. It only gets worse when she hears that her 19-year-old daughter, Leah, has been kidnapped. Sergeant Claire Boyle wasn't expecting to get caught up in a hostage situation during a doctor's appointment. When it becomes apparent that the kidnapping is somehow linked to the hostage taker, a woman called Eileen Delaney, she is put in charge of finding the missing girl.

Thick and Thin follows life-long friends when their world is hit by a bombshell. As students, Marianne Dillon and Clare McMahon become instant and unlikely friends. Marianne's generosity and Clare's steadfastness are the glue of a friendship that sees them through twenty-five years of love and loss, successes and disappointments, marriage and motherhood.

Long ago, on a windswept Irish beach, a young father died saving the life of another man's child. Thirty years later, his widow, Julia, decides to return to this wild corner of Ireland to lay the past to rest. Her journey sparks others: her daughter Bel, an artist, joins her mother in Ireland, while son Matt and daughter-in-law Rachel, at home in Liverpool, embark on some soul searching of their own. As the threads of past and present intertwine, Julia's family confront long-buried feelings of guilt, anger, fear and desire.

Siobhan Clough and her children are enjoying a holiday on the English coast. With them is Mary McCarthy and her volatile son, Liam. All is well until the arrival of Siobhan’s husband, George. A man of strong views and temper, he browbeats his wife, belittles his daughter, Christine, and treats Liam like a servant. A year later, Liam unexpectedly comes face to face with the father he has never known. Liam wants nothing to do with him, but when George Clough throws him out, he has little choice but to enter his father’s dangerous world of Irish politics. 

An enchanting and nostalgic tale of Ireland in the 1950s by Ireland’s favourite writer, Alice Taylor. The Phelans have owned Mossgrove for generations. The small, rural Irish farm has been the pride of them all until Ned's wife, Martha, arrives and begins to undermine generations of hard work and happiness. She resents the deep history of the place and sets about making it her own, shutting out what is left of Ned's family. She is particularly jealous of Ned's sister, Kate, a local nurse and doting aunt to Martha's children.

Best Loved Irish Legends brings together some of Ireland’s most loved folk stories for a younger audience. Stories from long, long ago, part of an ancient oral tradition, handed down from generation to generation and written down by the Christian monks of medieval Ireland.

Four hundred and twenty pearls hand sewn onto the wedding dress. The Mediterranean honeymoon booked for months. A pile of presents bigger than Everest. And her lovely Tim, the most perfect bridegroom a girl could wish for. Except, two weeks before the wedding, he changes his mind...Isobel's wedding is off. Her world in tatters, Isobel turns to Spain, a new job, a new life and as many men as she can decently manage. Including the very appealing Nico with whom, she feels, there could be a long-term future. But part of Isobel knows that she will have to go back home some day.

After his father’s death, Prince Lir is tricked into embarking on a perilous quest to rescue a maiden from a dragon. The studious young prince is no warrior, but he uses his brains to make himself indispensable to the ill-tempered dragon. However, neither prince nor dragon has bargained on the dark magic that manipulates them both—and it may be left to the maiden herself to save them all.

Oliver Molloy never meant to hurt his wife. It was an accident, not his fault. A respected lawyer, he needs to make sure no one finds out the truth. But there’s someone watching him, waiting for him to slip up. Photography student Joanna Lacey has always been close to her mother. But when Rachel Arnold turns up on her doorstep, Joanna’s world falls apart. The father she never knew has been found in the canal – a married man, now dead.

A mosaic of seven regular townsfolk are going about their days, blissfully unaware their lives are about to interweave, interchange and interact; entangling into such a messy web that, together—and unbeknownst to them—they end up changing the face of America forevermore. In the mold of movies such as Traffic, Magnolia & The Usual Suspects, In the Middle of Middle America follows multiple characters, allowing the listener to become a fly on the wall to observe seven lives as they entangle into such a mess that it all leads to a head-spinning twist.

Crookedwood, quiet Irish midlands town, place of secrets, past and present. Sarah left it behind years ago for life in the city, where she's now a rising star of the Dublin culinary scene. She's home to help her mother sell the family farm. One evening, while out walking in the nearby woods, Sarah is chased by a man and his vicious dog, narrowly escaping injury. In the days to follow—as painful memories resurface of another dark night in the woods years before—further unsettling events unfold, and Sarah becomes convinced that she is under threat.

Meet Belle. Belle has taken all the Christmas decorations down. This year they won’t be celebrating. As foster parents, Belle and Jim have given many children the chance of a happier start in life. They’ve loved them as if they were their own. They shouldn’t have favourites but little Lauren has touched their hearts. And now her mother is well enough to take her back and Belle can’t bear the loss. Hence, Christmas is cancelled. So when Jim crashes his car one icy December night, after an argument about Lauren, Belle can only blame herself.

On the verge of a marital breakup after the death of their stillborn son, a journalist, Omar Wilde, who is covering the Centenary Bloomsday celebrations of James Joyce’s Ulysses in Dublin, Ireland, is desperately looking for "the story" that will prove his worth to his disillusioned wife, Flora. While wandering around the Bloomsday celebrations, they find themselves embroiled in a potential terrorist attack. Faced with this life-threatening situation, Omar must finally conquer his fears and sense of failure before hundreds of people, including many dignitaries, are murdered horribly.

In early 2018, Erin Darcy created an online art project, "In Her Shoes – Women of the Eighth", to safely and anonymously share private stories of the real and devastating impact of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution of Ireland. In the five months leading up to the referendum on abortion, the project asked a simple question of undecided voters: put yourself in her shoes. Within weeks, Erin was receiving hundreds of stories from a broad spectrum of experiences of planned and unplanned terminations.

At the time of her death in 1815, twenty-nine-year-old Ellen Hutchins had catalogued over a thousand species of seaweed and plants from her native Bantry Bay. Ireland’s first female botanist, Ellen was a major contributor to nineteenth-century scientific discovery. And yet, like so many brilliant women lost in history, it is her personal story that will resonate today. In her remarkable debut novel, Marianne Lee fuses fact with fiction to imagine Ellen’s rich but tormented inner life, repressed by the gender and class confines of her time.

Separating fact from fiction, Anatomy of an Injustice—The Killing of Fr Niall Molloy re-examines the astonishing circumstances surrounding the death of a 52-year-old priest almost forty years ago.

This is a love story, set in the Irish literary world between 1986 and 2015. When they were first introduced by the poet Derek Mahon, Alannah Hopkin was an arts journalist turned full-time writer and Aidan Higgins, twenty-three years her senior, was a literary stylist, often cited as the heir to Ireland’s great Modernist tradition. They wrote steadily during their twenty-nine years together, but their careers could not have been more different: while Aidan focused on fiction and memoirs, Alannah prioritised work that paid the bills.