Darren McHugh

Bogwoman charts the experiences of a woman who moves to the city from Donegal in 1958. Down the years she copes with various personal and familiy pressures against the background of the emerging civil unrest and the redeployment of British troops into the area.

A small time thief from Belfast, Gerry Conlon, is falsely implicated in the IRA bombing of a pub that kills several people while he is in London. He and his four friends are coerced by British police into confessing their guilt. Gerry's father and other relatives in London are also implicated in the crime. He spends fifteen years in prison with his father trying to prove his innocence.

Broken Harvest is set in 1950's Ireland framed by modern-day New York. It deals with a bitter feud between two farmers who had taken opposite sides in the Irish Civil War many years before and who had also fought for the love of the same woman. When the feud is reawakened in the '50s it causes a major upheaval with tragic consequences for the lives of the two men, their families and the community. As the story unfolds it embraces many of the great, lingering issues affecting Ireland in this century - the War of Independence, the Civil War, emigration, the links with America, the clash between traditional, conservative values and those of a new technological age.

No one expects much from Christy Brown, a boy with cerebral palsy born into a working-class Irish family. Though Christy is a spastic quadriplegic and essentially paralyzed, a miraculous event occurs when, at the age of 5, he demonstrates control of his left foot by using chalk to scrawl a word on the floor. With the help of his steely mother — and no shortage of grit and determination — Christy overcomes his infirmity to become a painter, poet and author.

Jack's Bicycle