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Audiobooks Narrated by Aidan Kelly
Browse audiobooks narrated by Aidan Kelly, listen to samples and when you're ready head over to Audiobooks.com where you can get 3 FREE audiobooks on us
'Being a footballer was my destiny.'
After being expelled from school for playing football for his country, fifteen-year-old Liam Brady travelled to London to join Arsenal, and soon became an indispensable part of their glorious 1970s team. Rightly considered one of the Republic of Ireland's best-ever footballers, he went on to enjoy successes with Juventus, Sampdoria and West Ham, as well as managing Celtic and Brighton and Hove, and becoming assistant manager of his national team. Today he is best known for his much-respected TV punditry and searingly intelligent insights into the game he adores.
Full of honest insights, amusing anecdotes and recollections of extraordinary times, with Born to be a Footballer Brady delivers a compelling story of a fifty-year career that is unparalleled in Irish sport.
Superstitions only survive if people believe in them...
Renowned academic Dr Sparling seeks help with his project on a remote Irish village. Historical researchers Ben and Chloe are thrilled to be chosen – until they arrive...
The village is isolated and forgotten. There is no record of its history, its stories. There is no friendliness from the locals, only wary looks and whispers. The villagers lock down their homes at sundown. A nameless fear stalks the streets...
Nobody will talk – nobody except one little girl. Her story strikes dread into the hearts of the newcomers. Three times you see him. Each night he comes closer...
That night, Ben and Chloe see a sinister figure watching them. He is the Creeper. He is the nameless fear in the night. Stories keep him alive. And nothing will keep him away...
The Creeper is a masterful tale of horror and suspense, by one of Ireland's most talented emerging authors.
The hugely anticipated novel from the internationally bestselling author of The Pull of the Stars and Room
'Haven is everything a novel should be: compassionate, unpredictable, and questioning. This is Donoghue at her strange, unsettling best.' - Maggie O'Farrell, author of Hamnet
'Combines pressure-cooker intensity and radical isolation, to stunning effect.' – Margaret Atwood via Twitter
Three men vow to leave the world behind them and start anew . . .
In seventh-century Ireland, a scholar and priest called Artt has a dream telling him to leave the sinful world behind. Taking two monks – young Trian and old Cormac – he travels down the river Shannon in search of an isolated spot on which to found a monastery. Drifting out into the Atlantic, the three men find an impossibly steep, bare island inhabited by tens of thousands of birds, and claim it for God. Their extraordinary landing spot is now known as Skellig Michael. But in such a place, far from all other humanity, what will survival mean?
Haunting, moving and vividly told, Haven displays Emma Donoghue’s trademark world-building and psychological intensity – but this tale is like nothing she has ever written before . . .
A fascinating and entertaining historical investigation into what makes Ireland so different from its neighbours and why that led to independence. For hundreds of years, the islands and their constituent tribes that make up the British Isles have lived next door to each other in a manner that, over time, suggested some movement towards political union. It was an uneven, stop-start business and it worked better in some places than in others. Still, England, Wales and Scotland have hung together through thick and thin, despite internal divisions of language, religion, law, culture and disposition that might have broken up a less resilient polity. And, for a long time, it seemed that something similar might have been said about the smaller island to the west: Ireland. Ireland was always a more awkward fit in the London-centric mini-imperium but no one imagined that it might detach itself altogether, until the moment came for rupture, quite suddenly and dramatically, in the fall-out from World War I. So, what was it - is it - about Ireland that is so different? Different enough to sever historical ties of centuries with such sudden violence and unapologetic efficiency. Wherein lies the Irish difference, a difference sufficient to have caused a rupture of that nature? In a wide-ranging and witty narrative, historian Fergal Tobin looks into Ireland's past, taking in everything from religion and politics to sports and literature, and traces the roots of her journey towards independence.
In We Don't Know Ourselves, Fintan O'Toole weaves his own experiences into Irish social, cultural, and economic change, showing how Ireland, in just one lifetime, has gone from a reactionary 'backwater' to an almost totally open society—perhaps the most astonishing national transformation in modern history.
Born to a working-class family in the Dublin suburbs, O'Toole served as an altar boy and attended a Christian Brothers school. He was enthralled by American Westerns suddenly appearing on Irish television, which were not that far from his own experience, given that Ireland's main export was beef and it was still not unknown for herds of cattle to clatter down Dublin's streets. Yet the Westerns were a sign of what was to come. O'Toole narrates the once unthinkable collapse of the all-powerful Catholic Church, brought down by scandal and by the activism of ordinary Irish, women in particular. He relates the horrific violence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which led most Irish to reject violent nationalism. In O'Toole's telling, America became a lodestar, from John F. Kennedy's 1963 visit, when the American president was welcomed as a native son, to the emergence of the Irish technology sector in the late 1990s, driven by American corporations, which set Ireland on the path toward particular disaster during the 2008 financial crisis.
The prequel to the million-copy bestseller, A Woman of Substance, where, high on the Yorkshire moors, the story of Blackie O’Neill and Emma Harte begins…
Orphaned and alone, 13-year-old Blackie O’Neill must leave County Kerry to find work and put food in his mouth. His only chance of survival lies with his mother’s brother, far away in Leeds.
There, amid the noise and bustle, the mills and manufactories of the clothing industry that have made Leeds one of England’s most prosperous cities, Blackie’s spark of ambition becomes a flame. Working in his Uncle’s business, he nurtures a dream of throwing off the impotence of poverty, of building houses and perhaps even of becoming a gentleman.
And then, high on the Yorkshire moors, in the mists of a winter morning, he meets a kitchen maid called Emma Harte. And as the Victorian world gives way to the freedom of the Edwardian age, so a young man and a servant girl seize a chance, against the odds, to build a better life…
Don’t miss this stunning new novel from Barbara Taylor Bradford – available to pre-order now!
The story of Paddy Power’s growth from a small chain of Irish bookies to the biggest gambling company in the world.
Flutter Entertainment, the parent company of Paddy Power, is the largest gambling business in the world. The evidence of that success is visible everywhere, from shop fronts and bus shelters to sporting arenas and smartphone screens.
The company’s rise to this point has been rapid, but like any gambler worth their salt, Paddy Power has always succeeded in finding an edge. At the outset those innovations were modest, like offering odds on television shows and giving punters money back on losing bets, but as the company’s ambition grew, so too did its determination to stay one step ahead of the competition, whatever the cost…
Impeccably researched and informed by dozens of insider interviews, Punters is the incredible story of how an unlikely band of misfits and visionaries bet on the future of the gambling industry and won big. But it’s also the story of how that victory may have come at an extraordinary cost – to their customers and society at large.
Fintan O'Toole Ireland's leading public intellectual and author of Heroic Failure tells a history of Ireland in his own time a brilliant interweaving of memoir and historical narrative.
Fintan O'Toole was born in 1958, and so his life covers Ireland's journey out of underdevelopment and domination by the Church and the country's transformation into the relatively prosperous and tolerant society that it is today. But along the way there was a sectarian civil war in the North, which cast a dark shadow over the whole island, and bitter struggles for intellectual, civil and sexual freedoms. The Church fought a long rearguard action to defend its entrenched positions in education, healthcare and childcare. The truth about child abuse and institutional cruelty emerged only slowly, and women still had to die to make possible the liberalisation of Irish laws on contraception and divorce.
This is a very personal history by a writer who is considered by many to be the country's leading public intellectual. He was a participant in many of the controversies and and arguments of the past 35 years, and knew the leading literary, musical and political figures of those decades.
2021 Head of Zeus
Dublin detectives race to track a serial killer targeting care homes. LETHAL IN SMALL DOSES is the fourth crime fiction title in the Dublin Homicides series by David Pearson.
When an elderly resident of a care home passes away during the night, little is thought of it. But when a routine investigation turns up an anomaly, suspicions are raised. DS Fiona Moore follows her instincts that it is death by foul play and launches a murder inquiry. It is not long before there is a similar death. Concerned that they have a serial killer on their hands, DS Moore is nudged off her central role by her boss. Frustrated, but determined to bring the care home killer to justice, she pursues her lines of inquiry. Unfortunately, DS Moore is up against a particularly reckless individual. Having established their identity, if not their motive, the race is on to stop them acting again.
From the author of Shadowplay, shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize, The Costa Novel Prize and Novel of the Year winner at the An Post Irish Book Awards.
It's Dublin, June 1995, the hottest summer since records began. But Billy Sweeney, a middle-aged salesman with a failed marriage, a faltering career and a tumbledown house, has more than weather on his mind. His youngest daughter lies in a coma in hospital following a mysterious attack on the petrol station where she worked. Devastated by the unfolding consequences of that hot, violent night, frustrated by officialdom and failed by the system, Billy finally tires of seeking legal justice. He decides to take the law into his own hands...
'Very near perfection...you'll be on the edge of your seat.' - Literary Review
"Gripping and moving...a taut, expertly crafted plot." GUARDIAN
"Very near perfection. You'll be on the edge of your seat." THE LITERARY REVIEW
Irish detectives Maureen Lyons and Mick Hays face one of their hardest cases yet...
When a successful bookmaker is robbed and killed during the annual Galway Races, the motive seems clear. But when the money turns up untouched, more questions are raised than answered. Top Brass want the case wrapped up. The pressure is on DI Maureen Lyons to find the killer. However, the police didn't count on having to deal with a troublemaker within their own ranks. Rigorous detective work will be needed to find the culprit. But with more than a few suspects, the police are stretched to their limit. It may well require the luck of the Irish - and some underhand shenanigans - to crack the case.
