Bøger af Ron Duffy

A Further Shore is divided into two parts. Part One relates how the members of the Anderson household are caught up in the worst horrors of The Troubles in the early 1970s as death and destruction blight the brutal streets of Belfast. Part Two is set in Corrymore in 1995 after an interval of twenty years during which the "Peace Process" has run its course. Taking advantage of more tranquil times two Americans from Hollywood come to Corrymore with a view to using the village as a location for a movie based on the life of the long-dead, swashbuckling patriarch Finn MacLir. But they will shoot the movie in Corrymore only if all of the Orange graffiti are removed from around the harbour and the village. The tranquillity of Corrymore is shattered-again.

Redmond O'Hanlon is the best and least known of Irish highwaymen. Only seven years of his life are documented: from 1674, when he was proclaimed an outlaw, to 1681, when he died. The rest belongs in the realm of fiction: stories, folktales, songs, and ballads. This gives the novelist free rein to indulge his imagination. In Ó'Hanlon novelist Ron Duffy has added to the fiction that has collected round the name of O'Hanlon. In doing so has created a resourceful Robin-Hood figure, who, at the age of twenty, is swept up in the Irish Rebellion of 1641. The aim of the Rebellion is to win religious freedom and the return of lands confiscated from traditional chieftains, including the O'Hanlons. The Irish leadership is riven by mistrust and jealousy and lack the resources of the English and Scottish armies deployed against them. They go down to defeat by the disciplined forces of Oliver Cromwell. O'Hanlon flees to France and serves with distinction in both the French and Spanish armies at war in Flanders. Caught in dangerous situations, not all of them on the battlefield, and winning hearts as well as honours, O'Hanlon returns to Ireland. Expecting no restitution of his family's lands under the restored Charles II, O'Hanlon takes to the hills and woods of southern Ulster, the leader of a band of outlaws, famed as far as France for his daring exploits and his bold flaunting of attempts by the government in Ireland to capture him and rid the country of this most cunning and notorious challenge to their authority. This is Duffy's version of the O'Hanlon story. And who is to say that it didn't happen this way?

The story of the lives of four generations of a Northern Irish family, told against the background of the country s turbulent history. Theirs is a story of treachery, cruelty and destruction, but also of love, loyalty, kindness, and in the end a hope that the Troubles are coming to an end. In these novels Northern Ireland's past has never been made more comprehensible; its future more reassuring.

Sure of himself, sure of his place in the world, an independent, fearlessly free-thinking man, Finn MacLir shows what he is made of in a daring, adventurous life: fishing the stormy north Atlantic from harbours in Ireland, Iceland, Newfoundland; building clipper-ships in Boston; sailing the perilous high seas to Australia, to China, to Japan. When his father and brother are murdered in Ireland during Fenian outrages in 1880, Finn accepts the challenge of a new life in the unquiet land and turbulent times of late nineteenth century Ireland.

A few weeks before he was assassinated in 1947, Gandhi handed his grandson Arun a list of 'Seven Blunders, ' out of which, Gandhi claimed, springs the violence of crime, rebellion, and war that plagues the world. He considered these 'Seven Blunders of the World' as dangerous to humanity, as 'disbalances' that will kill us. In this book Ron Duffy picks up on Ghandi's idea but replaces Ghandi's Seven Blunders with what he calls Seven Social Evils which have arisen in modern times and left to continue unchecked will eventually-and he does not doubt it-create a world that is unfit for human life. In his Dedication to Pope Francis he quotes from the Pontiff's encyclical Laudato Si: "A sober look at our world shows that the degree of human intervention, often in the service of business interests and consumerism, is actually making our earth less rich and beautiful, ever more limited and grey, even as technological advances and consumer goods continue to abound limitlessly." That is the world to which Duffy's Social Evils is inevitably leading us. They are, in alphabetical order: Apathy, Cruelty, Fundamentalism, Greed, Ignorance, Inequality, and Mali