What starts as a class trip to the aquarium ends in the depths of the ocean, where the class has to escape from the jaws of a great white shark. Ms. Frizzle teaches the class about different shark species, including the goblin shark, angel shark, and the enormous whale shark. Illustrations.
In 1920, 18-year old Nancy Gulliver befriends a mysterious stranger and unwittingly becomes involved in the bloody conflict between the English and the Irish. (Nancy Pearl)
'One of Ireland's finest writers' Sunday Tribune
The explosive new novel by a master of Irish fiction
Helen has retreated to the remote north-west coast of Ireland to paint the sea and the shore, and to be alone with her past. English war hero Roger Hawthorne has settled in the neglected railway station house nearby. Mutilated and sick at heart, with the help of a young lad he has begun painstakingly to restore the derelict branch line station. Soon Roger and Helen form a bond which, over gramophone music, dancing and champagne, deepens into love. But Helen, enjoying her first taste of happiness in years, is to learn just how brutally fleeting it can be.
Alec and Jerry shouldn't have been friends: Alec's life was one of privilege, while Jerry's was one of toil. But this hardly mattered to two young men whose shared love of horses brought them together and whose whole lives lay ahead of them. When war breaks out in 1914, both Jerry and Alec sign up - yet for quite different reasons. On the fields of Flanders they find themselves standing together, but once again divided: as officer and enlisted man. And it is there, surrounded by mud and chaos and death, that one of them makes a fateful decision whose consequences will test their friendship and loyalty to breaking point.
Johnny, an outstanding young swimmer, went missing nearly thirty years ago: drowned, or so everyone except his sister Imogen believes. How could this have happened? Encouraged, pushed even, from a child by his father, Johnny could have made the Olympic team, couldn't he? As Imogen gradually pieces together bits of her family history, we hear the tragic echoes that connect her with the Great War and Ireland in the nineteen-twenties.
In a house overlooking Dublin Bay, Mimi and her daughter Grace are disturbed by the unexpected arrival of Grace's daughter Polly, and her new boyfriend. The events of the next few days will lead both of them to reassess the shape of their lives.
The hotel has stood on Dublin's quays since the 1920s, but its glory days are over. Most of the guests and staff we meet are escaping from something. Their stories are told in different chapters by seven Irish writers, including Roddy Doyle, Anne Enright and Colm Toibin.
