When Drew Linden's new job brings him back to his native Belfast, he is determined to remain distant from everything that once tied him there, including his friends and family. But as three of generation of family history unfold, it becomes clear that the past Drew has been running from is the very thing he needs to face.
The Lapsed Protestant is the work of non-fiction.
A view of the south of Ireland - political, social, geographical - through the eyes of a liberal northern protestant being asked to rejoin it.
Belfast, 1970s : Craig, St John and Mazine meet while at secondary school. Three very different people, they each come from testing backgrounds, and become friends just as life gets exciting and adulthood beckons. The years pass, and they try to live with themselves and the darker deeds of their hometown as honestly as they can. The Rest Just Follows is a sharply witty story about the people and place that make us who we are.
A witty and impassioned book on Ulster, which has been thrust into the centre of British and European politics and which is likely to become Britain's frontier with the wider world.
Number 5 is a 3-bedroom terrace house in suburban Belfast, where successive occupants navigate their joys and struggles amid the changing seasons outside. The memories of previous residents linger, shaping the house's atmosphere as they cope with life's challenges.
Hailed by Anne Enright as 'the best book about The Troubles ever written', this novel by Glenn Patterson - the Bafta-nominated writer behind the Good Vibrations film - spans three decades of Belfast history and is regarded by many as one of the finest Ulster novels ever written.
A topical novel about lost love, growing older and the realities of life in a society that is still coming to terms with thirty years of violence, some of that violence still very present and dangerous.
In the cold dawn of Christmas Day 1897, Gilbert Rice, 85-years-old and in failing health, recounts his journey into manhood in a city on the cusp of great change. Belfast in the 1830s was a city in flux. Industrialisation had led to an increase in population as workers flocked to the newly created jobs. Gilbert, a young man with prospects, begins work with the Ballast Office, supervising Belfast Port. But in the course of his days - and nights - abroad in the town, Gilbert becomes aware of tensions old and new. When he meets Maria, a Polish exile from Russian persecution, he is drawn into a love affair that will drive him to an act that could change his life, and the town's, for ever. The Mill for Grinding Old People Young is a brilliantly imaginative and moving historical novel. It evokes a vanished city that resonates powerfully with our contemporary anxieties.
This book features a wide and thought-provoking selection of Glenn Patterson's writings.