Whispers of the Turning World: Poems For those who listen to the quiet between heartbeats

Ruth Anne, known simply as Anne, began writing poetry as a teenager in the wake of her sister’s passing. What began as a way to cope with grief grew into a lifelong connection with words and emotion. Now, thirty years later, Anne returns to poetry as she navigates the loss of her father once again finding healing, reflection, and meaning through writing. Her work is raw, deeply personal, and rooted in love, loss, and the enduring strength of the human spirit.

Wild Colonial Boys: A Belfast Punk Story

Emerging from the streets of late-1970s Belfast, Ruefrex became one of Northern Ireland’s most distinctive punk bands. Founder member, songwriter and drummer Thomas Paul Burgess recounts the group’s turbulent journey from working-class Belfast through the British punk and post-punk scenes, combining personal memory with a portrait of a city undergoing political and cultural upheaval.

Wild Colonial Boys moves between Belfast and London and encounters figures including The Pogues, U2, The Cure, The Fall and Seamus Heaney. At its centre is the story of a band attempting to remain faithful to its origins while resisting the sectarian expectations surrounding it. Part music memoir, part social history, the book explores punk, class, identity, politics, friendship and the unreliable business of remembering one’s own past.

Lockout: Dublin 1913

‘Lockout’ is the story of the most famous Labour dispute in Irish history. On August 26th, 1913 Dublin’s trams stopped. Drivers, conductors and other staff put on the proscribed Red Hand badge of Jim Larkin’s Irish Transport and General Workers Union. They were supported by other trade unionists in Ireland and Britain, while Irish employers, Catholic and Protestant united under the leadership of William Martin Murphy, President of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce to smash this syndicalist organisation. Five months later the remnants of the ITGWU were starved back to work. The outcome foreshadowed the outcome of the Irish revolution and the true nature of Irish society for much of the following century.

The Contested Identities of Ulster Protestants

Edited by Thomas Paul Burgess and Gareth Mulvenna, The Contested Identities of Ulster Protestants examines the diversity concealed within the broad labels Protestant, Unionist and Loyalist. Bringing together academics, journalists, politicians and cultural commentators, the collection considers how social class, gender, politics, religion, sport, media representation and cultural expression complicate conventional understandings of Ulster Protestant identity.

Rather than treating the community as a single political or cultural bloc, the volume explores its internal divisions, competing allegiances and changing position within post-conflict Northern Ireland. Contributors examine subjects ranging from political representation and working-class loyalism to marching-band culture, sport, gender and the Scots-Irish diaspora. The result is an interdisciplinary examination of identity, stereotype and belonging in a society still negotiating the consequences of conflict.

The Contested Identities of Ulster Catholics

Edited by Thomas Paul Burgess, The Contested Identities of Ulster Catholics is the companion volume to The Contested Identities of Ulster Protestants. It questions the assumption that Northern Ireland’s Catholic, nationalist and republican communities constitute a culturally or politically homogeneous bloc.

Drawing on politics, history, sociology, education and cultural studies, contributors examine changing political attitudes, competing traditions within nationalism and republicanism, gender and reproductive politics, partition, education, labour politics and perceptions of northern Catholics from the Republic of Ireland. By foregrounding difference within a community often treated as singular, the collection explores the shifting relationship between religion, national identity, political allegiance and social change in contemporary Northern Ireland.

Through Hollow Lands

Against the unfolding events of 11 September 2001, George Bailey finds himself thousands of miles from the devastation, trapped in the artificial purgatory of Las Vegas. A stolen video has placed him in the path of the Russian mafia, while the reappearance of Jaffé Losoko, a young Ethiopian woman from his past, forces him to confront the consequences of the life he has led.

Drawing loosely on the architecture of Dante’s Inferno, Through Hollow Lands combines noir, thriller and elements of the supernatural in a story of guilt, deception and attempted redemption. Moving through a Las Vegas populated by pursuers, victims, truth-tellers and liars, the novel explores the psychological dislocation surrounding 9/11 and a culture suddenly confronted with its own vulnerability.

White Church, Black Mountain

In post-conflict Belfast, the apparent certainties of peace remain haunted by crimes committed during the Troubles. When Detective Inspector Dan Watson encounters Eban Barnard, younger brother of his murdered former colleague and mentor, he is drawn into a network of secrets reaching back across two decades. What emerges threatens not only those directly involved but the fragile political settlement constructed around them.

White Church, Black Mountain examines the human residue of political violence: damaged families, compromised loyalties, prejudice, corruption and the uneasy relationship between truth, justice and reconciliation. Combining the momentum of a political thriller with a broader exploration of memory and identity, the novel asks what happens when a society attempts to move forward while its unresolved past remains insistently present.

One Small Step

Danny Cronin is a ten-year-old boy from a Northern Irish Catholic family living in Birmingham, far away from The Troubles. Danny wants to be an astronaut when he grows up and writes science-fiction stories with himself as the hero.

The Troubles come to Birmingham. Two bombs, planted by the IRA, explode in two pubs, murdering twenty-one people and injuring over two hundred.

The next day, a Northern Irish visitor calls at the Cronin’s house. What will his arrival mean for Danny and where was the stranger on the night of the bombings?

Framed

WWII Switzerland is neutral, but Anna isn’t. Her mother’s German, her friends are Jewish and when she turns forger, she risks being FRAMED. 

Where Fortune Leads

Worldwide adventure in a race to save a family in the 1920s… and it all begins with a fortune cookie.