The Book on One 2005

Information on books featured on The Book on One 2005 series.

Monday 19 December - Friday 23 December
"THE VISITOR" by MAEVE BRENNAN
Read by: Doireann Ni Bhriain
Producer: Aidan Stanley

Monday 12 December - Friday 16 December
"PIGGY MONK SQUARE" by GRACE JOLIFFE
It is set in Liverpool in the 1970s, Toxteth to be exact and nine year old Sparra is running out of places to play. So, Sparra and her best mate Debbie make a bombed out house on Piggy Monk Square their own special hideaway. And that's when things start to go wrong.....

Grace Joliffe lives in Wicklow, having been brought up in Liverpool and apart from writing short stories she's also a maker of short films.

Produced in the RTÉ Studios in Cork by Aidan Stanley

Monday 5 December - Friday 9 December
"ORLANDO" by VIRGINIA WOOLF
Read by Alison Glennie.

Monday 28 November - Friday 2 December
"THIS IS THE COUNTRY" by WILLIAM WALL
Read by the author.

Monday 21 November - Friday 25 November
"MERCHANT PRINCE" by THOMAS McCARTHY
Read by the author.

Monday 14 November - Friday 21 November
"DEAR BOY" by LORD CHESTERFIELD
Read by Peter O'Shaughnessy.

Monday 7 November - Friday 11 November
"MANSFIELD" BY C.K. STEAD
Read by Alison Glennie.

Monday 31 October - Friday 4 November
"DRACULA" BY BRAM STOKER
Read by Aidan Grennell.

Monday 24 October - Friday 28 October
"WISH ME WELL" by Mick Hanley.
Read by the author.

Monday 17 October - Friday 21 October
"COMPANY: A CHOSEN LIFE" by John Montague.
Read by Gerard McSorley.

Monday 10 October - Friday 14 October
"Wide-Eyed In Medialand: A Broadcaster's Journey" by Denis Tuohy
Read by the author.

Monday 3 October - Friday 7 October
The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch by Anne Enright
Read by Niall Toibin and Martina Carroll
Repeat

Monday 26 September - Friday 30 September
The Last Of The Heroes by Billy Keane
Read by the author

Monday 19 September - Friday 23 September
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Published in 1847, Jane Eyre brought almost instant fame to its obscure author, the daughter of a clergyman in a small town in northern England. On the surface, the novel embodies stock situations of the Gothic novel genre such as mystery, horror, and the classic medieval castle setting; many of the incidents border on (and cross over into) melodrama. The story of the young heroine is also in many ways conventional-the rise of a poor orphan girl against overwhelming odds, whose love and determination eventually redeem a tormented hero.

Yet if this all there were to Jane Eyre, the novel would soon have been forgotten. In writing Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte did not write a mere romantic pot-boiler. Her book has serious things to say about a number of important subjects: the relations between men and women, women's equality, the treatment of children and of women, religious faith and religious hypocrisy (and the difference between the two), the realisation of selfhood, and the nature of true love. But again, if its concerns were only topical, it would not have outlived the time in which it was written. The book is not a tract any more than it is a pot-boiler. It is a work of fiction with memorable characters and vivid scenes, written in a compelling prose style. In appealing to both the head and the heart, Jane Eyre triumphs over its flaws and remains a classic of nineteenth-century English literature and one of the most popular of all English novels.

Monday 12 September - Friday 16 September
ZAPPA by Barry Miles
Barry Miles' biography of Frank Zappa gives the reader a composite image of this rock legend bringing the musician, the composer, the controversialist and the family man together for the first time in print. The book follows Zappa from his sickly Italian-American childhood in Baltimore to his death from cancer in the early 1990s. He played a modest part in the transformation of Czechoslovakia when the Velvet Revolution set up democracy in the former Communist State. The then Czech President Vaclav Havel, is quoted as saying "Frank Zappa was high up there in rock heaven ...whenever I think I want to escape I think of him."

Closer to home, Zappa formed quite a close bond with The Chieftains, spending an amount of time working with the Irish trad group in his recording studio in California.

Read by Roger Gregg

Monday 5 September - Friday 9 September
McCARTHY'S BAR by Pete McCarthy
Read by the author

Monday 27 August - Friday 2 September
MEMOIR by John McGahern
Read by the author

Memoir is an intensely felt, beautifully drawn recollection of childhood love and loss. It is the story of McGahern's upbringing in Leitrim, his family, local characters, and the incidents and rituals of daily life - both funny and poignant by turns. At the centre of the young McGahern's life lies his relationship with his parents. The book portrays his adoration of his gentle and nurturing schoolteacher-mother, and his fear of his brutal, mercurial father, a police sergeant trapped in a rural backwater station.

The drama is set against the beautiful but impoverished landscape of wartime Ireland, and McGahern's memories of the pleasures and beauties of his homeland are rendered in exquisite and unsentimental prose. It is both a classic family story and a history of rural Ireland of the time: a 19th century country in the middle of the 20th century, a time of spiritual certainty amid poverty and mass emigration.

John McGahern is the author of six highly acclaimed novels and four collections of short stories, and has been the recipient of many awards and honours, including the Society of Authors, the American-Irish Award, the Prix Etrangère Ecureuil and the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Amongst Women, which won both the GPA and Irish Times Award, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and made into a four-part BBC television series. McGahern's work has appeared in anthologies and has been translated into many languages. He lives in County Leitrim.

Memoir will be published in Hardback on 1 September by Faber and Faber.

Monday 22 August - Friday 26 August
"Stone Mad" by Seamus Murphy
Read by Liam Heffernan.

Monday 15 August - Friday 19 August
"Meini: The Blasket Nurse" by Leslie Matson
Read by Aine Moynihan

Monday 8 August - Friday 12 August
"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" by Milan Kundera
Read by Gary Murphy

Monday 1 August - Friday 5 August
"A Doctor's War" by Dr. Aidan MacCarthy
Read by Donncha Crowley

Monday 25 July - Friday 29 July
"Specimen Days In America" by Mark Twain
Read by Karl O'Neill
(Repeat)

Monday 18 July - Friday 22 July
Turn Left At Greenland by Mark Little
Read by the author
(Repeat)

Monday 11 July - Friday 15 July
World Cup Diary '94 by Joseph O'Connor
Read by the author
(Repeat)

Monday 4 July - Friday 8 July
The American West by Dee West,
author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

This book looks at the Old West, when settlers, ranchers and Native Indians spent much of the nineteenth century struggling for their place in the new landscape of America. While Americans celebrate the 4th of July and all that that conjures up, listeners can hear excerpts all week long from this book, which gives expression to the memory of the likes of Sitting Bull, Billy the Kid and Buffalo Bill, amongst others.

Monday 27 June - Friday 1 July
This Is The Country by William Wall
Read by the author.

Monday 20 June - Friday 24 June
Sailing for Home by Theo Dorgan
Based on his logbook, Theo's account of the voyage of 'The Spirit of Oysterhaven' from the Caribbean to the coast of his native County Cork is meditative, philosophical and absorbing. In effect, it is what happens when four people - three experienced sailors and a novice (the author) - cross the Atlantic aboard a 70-foot schooner. The book is read by the author.

Monday 13 June - Friday 17 June
Notes On A Scandal by Zoe Heller
Read by Alison Glennie

Monday 6 June - Friday 10 June
Mansfield by C. K. Stead
Read by Alison Glennie

Monday 30 May - Friday 3 June
Alone Himself by Dean Godson
Alone Himself is an account of the political highs and lows of David Trimble. The author is Dean Godson and Peter Gaynor is the reader.

Monday 23 May - Friday 27 May
I'll Live Till I Die by Aidan O'Hara
Popular singer Delia Murphy was born on February 16, 1902 in Ardroe, Claremorris. As a young girl she befriended the travellers who camped near her home. One of them, Tom Maugham, around Delia's age, introduced her to ballad singing. In time she would also get her songs from her father, from books, from people in her home village and from the collector Dr Arthur Darley. Delia's biggest hits were The Blackbird, The Spinning Wheel and Three Lovely Lassies.

Delia's story is read by Martina Carroll and produced by Aidan Stanley in RTÉ Cork.

Monday 16 May - Friday 20 May
Hail and Farewell by George Moore
George Moore was a key figure in the founding of the Irish Literary Theatre until he was eventually frozen out by Yeats and Lady Gregory. This book offers a demystified view of Lady Gregory and Yeats and it also provides a running commentary on how The Irish Literary Theatre, and eventually The Irish National Theatre, got off the ground prior to the consolidation of the movement when it moved into the Abbey Theatre. Moore was an interesting man, at times a braggart, at times witty and wickedly gossipy.

The reader, Peter O'Shaughnessy, is a veteran Australian actor, based in Britain but a regular visitor to these shores. Aidan Stanley is the producer.
(First broadcast 18th October 2004)

Monday 9 May - Friday 13 May
The Visitor by Maeve Brennan
This novella by Irish writer, Maeve Brennan was written while she was still in her twenties but never published in her lifetime. It was discovered in 1997, four years after her death in New York. Set in the Dublin of the 1930s, The Visitor tells the story of Anastasia King, a young woman who returns after her mother's death in Paris to her former home in Dublin where her grandmother - her father's mother - still lives. Loneliness, disappointment and a search for home are among the themes of this poignant work which has been described as a 'miniature masterpiece' (Clare Boylan).
The Visitor is read by Doireann Ní Bhriain.

Doireann Ní Bhriain worked for many years with RTE radio and television as a presenter and producer and now divides her time between arts consultancy and broadcasting.

The Visitor is published by New Island books. Angela Bourke's biography of Maeve Brennan, Homesick at the New Yorker, is published by Jonathan Cape.

Monday 2 May - Friday 6 May
Silas Marner by George Eliot
Silas Marner is the weaver in the English countryside village of Raveloe in the early nineteenth century. Like many weavers of his time, he is an outsider-the object of suspicion because of his special skills and the fact that he has come to Raveloe from elsewhere. The villagers see Silas as especially odd because of the curious cataleptic fits he occasionally suffers. Silas has ended up in Raveloe because the members of his religious sect in Lantern Yard, an insular neighborhood in a larger town, falsely accused him of theft and excommunicated him. This is a story of a man's struggle to be accepted in society and the love that develops between him and a 'daughter', Eppie, who accidentally comes into his life.
Read by Liam Heffenan

Monday 25 April - Friday 29 April
Testimony to an Irish Slave Girl by Kate McCafferty
Read by Martina Carroll and Gary Murphy. A true story. The account of one woman's plight when, as a child of 10, she is snatched from the streets of Galway and taken to Barbados to live the life of a slave. That was in 1651 and she joined an estimated 50,000 other Irish who "disappeared" as indentured servants. Her story is told in the "Book on One" with Martina Carroll and Gary Murphy reliving the roles of Cot Daley and her interrogator. (First broadcast 1 November 2004)

Monday 18 April - Friday 22 April
Hard Shoulder by Peter Woods
When McBride, a young Irishman, leaves Co Monaghan for the building sites of London, he is confronted by a harsh new world and the volatile men who have mastered and mythologised it. Quickly overwhelmed by the unrelenting search for work and love, he finds himself enslaved to the road ahead, embittered by the cold comforts of its hard shoulders. But when McBride eventually returns to London, the limits of the heavy digger's life, its quixotic pursuit of the Big Money, its unreachable horizons, are brought shockingly and suddenly home.

Peter Woods' Hard Shoulder is the story of countless unheard voices, transmuting the haunting interior landscapes of Ireland's unconsidered exiles into a novel of intense colour and vibrancy. Funny, superbly written, laced with dialogue that rings like a shovel on steel, this debut is a canny, knowing, many-splendoured thing.

First broadcast December 2004

Monday 11 April - Friday 15 April
The Georgics of Virgil
The Georgics of Virgil" is a 2000 line poem translated by Peter Fallon. It is published by Gallery Press, which is run by Peter and extracts are read by Peter also. Seamus Heaney reviewed the book for The Irish Times last October and he began by praising Peter's translation: "It is this combination of truth to the words Virgil wrote, natural vernacular speech and a general at-homeness on the land that make Fallon's an inspired translation. Peter Fallon succeeds because what you are hearing is speech that might be heard any day from a man on a headrig or a tractor...."

The poem is titled "The Georgics" because it deals with the land (the Greek for farmer is "georgos")and it was written in the 1st century B.C

Translated and read by Peter Fallon

Monday 4 April - Friday 8 April
Regeneration by Pat Barker.
This is Pat Barker's celebrated novel about the rejection of the Great War by the poet, Siegfried Sassoon. He was a serving officer at the time and he could have faced grave consequences for his Manifesto in which he rubbished those who ran the war. Instead, he was sent to an institution outside Edinburgh to have his motives examined, where he met other more severely battle-scarred rejects of World War One.

The Book on One is read by Gary Murphy. Regeneration is part of the Leaving Cert. Syllabus.

Monday 28 March - Friday 1 April
The Way to Paradise by Mario Vargas Llosa
The Way to Paradise by the well-known Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa tells two stories - that of Paul Gauguin, the post-Impressionist painter, and that of his grandmother, Flora Tristan. Gauguin's fascination with the tropical beauties of the South Sea Islands is fairly well known and the novel explores the life of the visionary painter of paradise with brilliantly stated panache. The recreation of the tactile, sensuous details of Paul's life spills over into the account of the daily grind of grandmother, an early devotee of Trade Unionism and a women's libber long before her time.

The book is read by Sharon Hogan.

Monday 21 March - Friday 25 March
Collected Stories by Frank O'Connor
Read by Paschal Scott and Mark O'Reagan

Monday 14 March - Friday 18 March
Fan Inti le Domhnall Mac Sithigh
Á leamh ag an údar.

Monday 7 March - Friday 11 March
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Read by Alison Glennie
The book is on the Leaving Certificate Syllabus 2005

Published in 1847, Jane Eyre brought almost instant fame to its obscure author, the daughter of a clergyman in a small town in northern England. On the surface, the novel embodies stock situations of the Gothic novel genre such as mystery, horror, and the classic medieval castle setting; many of the incidents border on (and cross over into) melodrama. The story of the young heroine is also in many ways conventional-the rise of a poor orphan girl against overwhelming odds, whose love and determination eventually redeem a tormented hero.

Yet if this all there were to Jane Eyre, the novel would soon have been forgotten. In writing Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte did not write a mere romantic pot-boiler. Her book has serious things to say about a number of important subjects: the relations between men and women, women's equality, the treatment of children and of women, religious faith and religious hypocrisy (and the difference between the two), the realisation of selfhood, and the nature of true love. But again, if its concerns were only topical, it would not have outlived the time in which it was written. The book is not a tract any more than it is a pot-boiler. It is a work of fiction with memorable characters and vivid scenes, written in a compelling prose style. In appealing to both the head and the heart, Jane Eyre triumphs over its flaws and remains a classic of nineteenth-century English literature and one of the most popular of all English novels.

Monday 28 February - Friday 4 March
Valentine by Chet Raymo
A love story about the man who gave his name to lovers

The romance of the physician Valentine and blind Julia provides the central thread of this engrossing novel, which brings alive the world of the Roman Empire at the time of Claudius II ­ a time when Christians were amongst those whose deaths provided public entertainment in the Flavian Amphitheatre and the Circus Maximus. It is a novel of remarkable resonance, its ideas startlingly relevant to our own times: globalisation vs. fundamentalism, reason vs. superstition, civil law vs. personal freedom, the perverse gratifications of sex and violence, the subversion of virtue by wealth ­ and the power of passionate love to overcome all obstacles to its consummation.

Valentine is Chet Raymo's first novel since The Dork of Cork (Warner Books 1993), was translated into fourteen languages and was filmed as Frankie Starlight (directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg).

Published by Brandon Books, ISBN 0 86322 327 3
Further information from www.brandonbooks.com
Read by Michael Patric.

Monday 21 February - Friday 25 February
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Don Quixote is a middle-aged gentleman from the region of La Mancha in central Spain. Obsessed with the chivalrous ideals touted in books he has read, he decides to take up his lance and sword to defend the helpless and destroy the wicked.

This classic tale is read by Niall Toibin.

Monday 14 February - Friday 18 February
On the Natural History of Destruction by W.G. Sebald
Sixty years ago, on Valentines Day, the Allied bombing of Germany had reached its nadir with the destruction of the beautiful city of Dresden. The account of this firebombing and that of other German cities is the background to W.G.Sebald's book "On the Natural History of Destruction".

In the last years of World War Two, the Allies dropped a million tons of bombs on Germany, yet the German people remained silent about the resulting devastation and loss of life, failing to recognise the terrible shadow that destruction from the air cast over their land. In this book, W.G.Sebald wonders why this is so...and he questions the lack of curiosity in this phenomenon by successive generations of German writers.

Read by Kieran Ahern

Monday 7 February - Friday 11 February
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.

First published in 1958, this is the story of a 'strong' man whose life is dominated by fear and anger. It is also a social document, recounting the impact of colonialism and Christianity on the life of an African tribe - the Ibo - in turn-of-the-century Nigeria. The book is the story of Okonkwo, a great but deeply flawed man, proud and violent yet deeply concerned with right and wrong and the rule of law. His village is strongly traditional, and Achebe repeatedly emphasises the use of laws and village beliefs to settle disputes.

These are far from Conrad's savages, but rather they present a life every bit as orderly and civilised as the Europeans soon to be invading them. When Okonkwo commits a crime (accidentally) he accepts his punishment unquestioningly, as do his close friends who must punish him, because to not do so is alien to them. Their society is not presented as idyllic, and has many unpleasant aspects (the beating of women, the killing of all twins, the sacrifice of Okonkwo's adopted son), but it is, above all, subject to the rule of law. This is an Africa that many western writers have enjoyed pretending didn't exist. The joy of this book is in Achebe's understanding of the Ibo and his ability to explain the workings of a successful peaceful society. The darkness that Conrad saw comes from Okonkwo and men like him, but who exist all over the world, and also from the Europeans who went about 'pacifying' a peaceful people. It is an incredibly important story, beautifully written with an almost mythic quality. A book that stays with the reader long after it has been put down.

Monday 29 January - Friday 4 February
Hero Town by Bryan Mac Mahon
Here in Hero Town lives Peter Mulrooney: forty years old, forty years young; an unhitched pedagogue teetering on the edge of fulfilment. Hero Town lies in the middle of nowhere, the centre of everywhere. Its citizens quarrel, grovel and intrigue; succeed and fail in lovemaking. If a man raises his head in pride, they lower it, if he lowers it, they raise it. They adore stories and preserve the life of the imagination. They communicate in the shorthand of the nerves.

By straining his eyes Peter can see vaguely through cavity walls and windows. Fingers snap, the inhabitants spring to attention. They shudder, shake, fall sidelong, round and round on the circular moving contraption of life.

Monday 24 January - Friday 28 January
JAYWALKING WITH THE IRISH by David Managan
Read by Cormac Costelloe

Monday 17 January - Friday 21 January
Notes On A Scandal by Zoe Heller
Read by Alison Glennie