Set in the seaside towns of Ireland, within the tiled Victorian walls of Kensal Rise Baths, in Dublin on the day de Valera is buried, rites of passage are enacted -the end of childhood, the moment of death, the end of an affair. A collection of short stories first published in1976.

Published in 1976 by the Irish Writers' Co-operative, Dublin.

Published in 1989 by The Hogarth Press.

ISBN 0 7012 08597

Tugging the story of the past towards his own birth, a man searches for the truth about his parentage. His grandmother was a flamboyantly bad actress at the Abbey Theatre married to a Free State hero and their beautiful daughter a model and actress. Through the reminiscences of his mother's friend, the pieces of the past begin to fit together into a delicate mosaic of the truth.

First published in Great Britian by Jonathan Cape Ltd. 1980.

Abacus edition published in 1982 by Sphere Books Ltd.

ISBN 0-349-11857-4

As always the man leaves his suburban house every morning for the city, walking past the hissing lawn-sprinklers to the station where people wait for trains that hardly ever come. In his office he works on a drawing for a campaign to advertise the scent of musk, whose animal attraction is peculiarly appropriate to the relationship developing between himself and the woman who has given him the commission. They meet and couple at the zoo, where escaping animals rustle and chatter in the undergrowth. Back home the man's loved ones regard him with mingled pain and unease as his appearance and behaviour degenerate to the point where he must be restrained.

But the flimsy doors of locked suburban bedrooms are not made for the caging of beasts. Out there in those decaying streets, a destiny is calling. In a phantasmagoria of frightening apocalyptic intensity, as the storm finally breaks over the city and indeed the world, the beast achieves an apotheosis that is both awesome and heartrendering.

Published in 1983 by Chatto & Windus.

ISBN 0-7011-2740-6

ISBN 0-7011-2741-4 Pbk.

Imprisoned in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, awaiting execution, Donal Gore is sustained by memories of setting fishing lines on the beach with his father, back home in Ireland. Gradually, with his memories, the events that brought him there emerge, the personal and political betrayals which are his heritage-and it seems, his destiny. Released from the Spanish prison by a German officer, who expects political intelligence in return, Donal goes home to the house on the rainswept promenade in Bray - to find his once powerful and political father dramatically changed.

The heart of the novel explores the hopeless inability of these two men to express their feelings for one another - until the father is literally beyond language. And at the same time it centres on the poignant, fumbling triangular relationship between father, son and Rose, the beautiful young stepmother. Political deception follows on personal as Donal is drawn into the lunatic world of wartime politics in the Irish Free State.

Published in 1994 by Chatto & Windus.

ISBN 0 7011 6201 5