About the Book

The Christmas Doctor, Book Two details his experiences in Chicago and Oak Park and shows the powerful influence these experiences had on his later life.  Filled with the danger and heartache of a country medical practice, the book also captures the refreshing humor of the relationship of physician with patient.

John Weber worked his way through medical school in Chicago by hauling freight each evening at the LaSalle Street Railroad Station, finally graduating from Loyola University in 1917.  Buy Book Here!

Irish Crossings is a voyage of love, partings and new beginnings in the time of the Irish Potato Famine. Caitlin and Paddy embark on a journey across a beautiful country overwhelmed with heart-breaking sadness during the time of the Great Hunger. A harrowing winter crossing takes them through the treacherous North Atlantic Ocean. But the slums of New York are not the end of the rainbow they were promised. Through their voyage together they learn the true meaning of the Irish saying, ‘It is in the shelter of each other that people live.’ Buy Book Here!

ISBN: 978-0692761168
School of Hard Knocks Publishing
P.O. Box 402636, Hesperia, CA 92340-2636, U.S.A.
book cover art and design by DeSantis DeSign, Hesperia, California

Book Description
 Ashling is an Irish-mythology-based epic fantasy adventure novel. It has been compared to Lord of the Rings, Narnia, The Hobbit, Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, Beowulf, and Brave (Irish Film Board Readers Reports, August 2015). One literary agent even described it as having “…shades of Avatar.” Buy Book Here! or Here! and wherever books are sold worldwide.

Synopsis
Writing the Sky: Observations and Essays on Dermot Healy is a comprehensive collection of critical essays, memoirs, poetry, and other writer responses devoted to the life and work of the late Dermot Healy (1947– 2014). Healy was an accomplished poet, short story writer, novelist, playwright, and editor, and so these essays and observations address the entire range of his eclectic and exciting oeuvre. While paying due tribute to the memory of the man himself, the collection primarily seeks to establish a series of important critical perspectives through which Healy’s writings can be properly viewed and assessed. Buy Book Here!

Synopsis
Initially published in 1984, Dermot Healy’s stunning first novel, Fighting with Shadows, returns to print after almost thirty years. Largely set in the border village of Fanacross, Co. Fermanagh, as Ireland stumbles clumsily toward modernity, the Allen family negotiate a bitter and troubled terrain.  Fighting with Shadows offers extraordinary and poetic glimpses of the compelling lives of ordinary people. The novel’s landscape is of borderlands, of in-between spaces; it tells of violently sundered geographical borders, of maddening religious differences, of the anguished gaps between people as they struggle to find each other, and of how the dead reside among its inhabitants long after they’ve passed. A realist account and nightmarish fable, Fighting with Shadows is critical to the history of modern Irish fiction. Buy Book Here!

Synopsis
Although Dermot Healy (1947-2014) is probably best known as a novelist and poet, he was also a prolific playwright, screenwriter, and actor. Healy’s interest in drama was long-standing, and was central to his development as a writer. Between 1985 and 2010 he wrote thirteen stage plays, all of which are gathered here for the first time. Although the settings of Healy’s plays are often local and regional by design, their energy and vision transcend those boundaries. In this respect, the publication of The Collected Plays will be of interest to all scholars and practitioners of contemporary drama. Buy Book Here!

Synopsis:

Like many of the great Irish writers before him, Dermot Healy first announced himself as a writer of intricate and innovative short stories. Healy’s stories are set in small-town Ireland and its rural environs, and in the equally suffocating confines of the Irish expat communities in London. Throughout these texts, Healy demonstrates a deep sense of compassion towards the marginalized and the dispossessed, without ever becoming sentimental or clichéd. The language is earthy and imagistic by turn, and he continually seeks to extend the formal boundaries of the genre.Gathering all of Healy’s stories together for the first time, this collection includes the long prose-drama “Before the Off” and Healy’s final short works, “Along the Lines” and “Images.” Buy Book Here!

Synopsis
The O'Donovans' affluent lifestyle is mostly unaffected by simmering tensions for Home Rule in Ireland. Change intrudes upon their lives when Grace O'Donovan welcomes her older sister, Deirdre, home from her year abroad. Grace expects to find her sister worldlier, more sophisticated after her sojourn in Europe. Instead, Deirdre is moody and listless.  Buy Book Here!

Synopsis

This book is separated into two parts. The first part consists of memories as a patrolman. The second part references my years as a sergeant. I divided the book this way for the ease of reading because patrolman’s work and sergeant’s responsibilities are so completely different. Buy Book Here

by Maryrose Carroll

Poet, Maryrose Carroll writes about love again!

love again!The poems in Conversations with a Dead Lover, by Maryrose Carroll, are beautifully contemplative, yet deeply visceral. Addressed often directly, often peripherally, to her husband, the great American poet and editor, Paul Carroll, they take head-on the conundrum of love in its myriad guises. $14.99 Buy Book Here!