Arethusa Clayton has always been formidable, used to getting her own way. On her death, she leaves unexpected instructions. Instead of being buried in America, on the wealthy East Coast where she and her late husband raised their two children, Arethusa has decreed that her ashes be scattered in a remote corner of Ireland, on the hills overlooking the sea. But who were her family in Ireland and where are they now? What was the real reason that she...

After a tough few years floundering around the British film industry, experimenting with amateur pornography and watching her father's health rapidly decline, Charlie and her best friend Laura journey to her ancestral home of Clipim, an island off the west coast of Ireland. Knowing this could be the last chance to connect with her dad's history before she loses him, Charlie clings to the idea of her Irish roots offering some kind of solace. But she'll...

When Cissy Ryan's real mother comes to claim her from the workhouse, it's not how she imagined. Her family's tumbledown cottage has ice on the inside of its windows and is in an isolated, poverty-stricken village in the muddy Irish countryside. But when Cissy is allowed to help neighbour Colm Doyle and his horse named Blue on their milk round one morning, Cissy starts to feel as though friendship could get her through anything. It's Colm who looks...

We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling. In Faha, County Clare, everyone is a long story... Bedbound in her attic room beneath the falling rain, in the margin between this world and the next, Plain Ruth Swain is in search of her father. To find him, enfolded in the mystery of ancestors, Ruthie must first trace the jutting jaw lines, narrow faces and gleamy skin of the Swains from the restless...

One messy murder affects the lives of five misfits who exist on the fringes of Ireland's post-crash society. Ryan is a 15-year-old drug dealer desperate not to turn out like his alcoholic father, Tony, whose obsession with his unhinged next-door neighbour threatens to ruin him and his family. Georgie is a prostitute, whose willingness to feign a religious conversion has dangerous repercussions, while Maureen, the accidental murderer, has returned...

?We?re in the back of a car belonging to the men our mothers told us to never get in the back of a car of. I close my eyes and wonder how many girls will come to my funeral.? Vincent Patrick Duffy has already checked out. Trapped between Skintown?s narrow horizons, he chops ribs and chickens in a takeaway, dreaming of escape, joint after freshly rolled joint. A mindless act of kindness leads to the unlikeliest of business opportunities. Where the...

Once a year, on All Souls' Day, it is said in Ireland that the dead may return. 'Solar Bones' is the story of one such visit. Marcus Conway, a middle-aged engineer, turns up one afternoon at his kitchen table and considers the events that took him away and then brought him home again.

Joe McKee - pillar of the Derry community - is dead. As arrangements are made for the traditional Irish wake, friends and family are left reeling at how cancer could have taken this much-loved man so soon. But grief is the last thing that Joe's daughter Ciara and step-daughter Heidi feel. For they knew the real Joe - the man who was supposed to protect them and did anything but. As the mourners gather, the police do too, with doubt being cast over...

For 13-year-old Nora Doyle every day is a fight for survival in Ballybun, the rural Irish village she calls home. Each night, as she feels the cold wind blowing through the cracks of her family's cramped cottage, Nora longs to escape the poverty surrounding her, and find her place in the world. When she meets Edward, from the grand house that looms over her tiny village, she feels an unlikely kinship that is impossible to explain, and as she grows...

When Peter Fisher is called to the scene of a supposed prank call, irritation turns to terror when he realises this is no joke. A young boy says he witnessed a little girl being bundled into the boot of a car, and Peter believes him. DI Cormac Reilly and Peter search frantically for answers, but find obstacles put in their way by the one person who should be helping them: Superintendent Bryan Murphy. Frustrated and severely short-staffed, Peter and...