Bøger udgivet af Marble City Publishing

There was a curse on the 'Big House'. A local peasant foretold that the family would someday be 'ruled by a cripple!' So, when a son was born without any limbs, it seemed the premonition had come true. But nobody could have foretold what the boy would achieve and how his name would go down in history as one of the most remarkable Irishmen to ever live. An amazing story of 19th century life, love and courage that reached across continents and social classes. This is an unforgettable novel of yearning, perseverance and gritty determination to both inspire and challenge. There is nothing the human spirit cannot overcome. 'I have worked with Maria O'Rourke and greatly admire her writing and storytelling.' Joseph O' Connor 'Maria O'Rourke's sympathetic, insightful imagining of Arthur MacMurrough Kavanagh's life is a tremendous achievement. This is an amazing story, beautifully told, of resilience and fortitude, and a searing portrait of a fracturing, transforming society.' Donal Ryan 'In writing this absorbing novel, Maria O'Rourke has brought to life the people, the landscape and another time in south Carlow, but she has also produced a work that lingers in the memory long after the last page has been read. Defying the Curse is a wonderful book.' John MacKenna

You get to be a lot of people when you are a vampire. Meet old Harry Haze: war criminal, Jewish stand-up comedian, friend of Marcel Proust and J. Edgar Hoover. John Harper encounters him while spending the summer in the South of France with his mistress Lucy, and is entranced by Harry's stories of his fabulous past. Then Lucy disappears without explanation and both John and Harry fall under suspicion. Yet how are we to know the truth when it is hidden in the labyrinth of Harry's bizarre memories and John's guilt at abandoning his wife? Nothing in this story is certain. Is Lucy dead? Is Harry a harmless old druggie or really a vampire? Deep inside his humorous tales is the suppressed memory of a night of sheer horror. And it is possible that one of the two men is an insane killer.

Southern Cameroon, West Africa 1936 A virus mutated and crossed the barrier from primate to human. In less than a century it had claimed the lives of twenty-five million people. Africa, a land of natural beauty and riches, ripe for plunder, full of dark menace. In a near future scenario of viral pandemic, global religious conflict, climate change and mass migration, America and the Middle East are locked in a religious fundamentalist race to Armageddon, while the old nations of Europe flex their imperial muscles. Will mankind rediscover the Garden of Eden or ignite the crucible of the apocalypse? The Europeans are using stealth and Thomas is the most deadly of mercenaries. Any conscience he had died with his wife and children under a blood-soaked African sun. He works for an agency with a taste for righting wrongs on a grand scale - an organisation with deep pockets, altruistic motives and a pragmatic approach to the dispensation of justice. Greg is a failed philanderer and small-time inventor, struggling to earn a crust for his family. When the enigmatic Thomas steals his identity, Greg is lured into a web of global corruption, conspiracy and murder. But are these unlikely friends really on the side of good or evil?

The New Author is a 200 page book in three sections: writing basics, developing a 'social media platform' and e-publishing as an independent author. Take your manuscript from ready to go with this informative and easy to read guide. With foreword by Jim Williams, author of ten internationally published novels including the Booker Prize nominated Scherzo.

His choices. Their lives. A moment of madness. Ger Mayes is a slacker. A consumer. He thinks life owes him, takes what he can and goes with the flow. His perspective on life, like that of another famous slacker The Big Lebowski, is sometimes humorous, but the story takes a noir turn when Ger kills a mugger and is held to account for it. All things move toward their end, of that you can be sure. Contemporary Irish crime fiction set in Dublin and Kilkenny, Peril is the story of an anti-hero. Men want to be him, women want to redeem him. Ger's story is fiction, but his origins are real - everyday folk living and working in a Dublin city center wracked with organized begging, drug addicts and violent crime. It's not all leprechauns and shillelaghs in Ireland. Ladies, don't let your man read this book. You don't want him getting ideas. Fellas, keep your copy well hidden.

After nine years in maximum security prison for crimes against the state, Ger Mayes is on release. Free to try and recover the life he destroyed, free to rediscover love and normality. "The worst criminal I have ever met," the judge stated at Ger's trial, and it wasn't a professional compliment. A decade of rubbing shoulders with Ireland's criminal elite hasn't improved Ger's skills. Two weeks after release Ger sits on a Dublin park bench, the uniformed authorities to his right, the gangsters with their bad trousers to his left, a blonde woman's fragrant head in a bag at his feet. He should have got the hell out of Dodge when DI Andy McAuliffe told him to. How has it come to this? His wife is ex, his son estranged. The authorities have his number and so do the local criminal fraternity. A couple of choice decisions place Ger in the middle of a brothel turf war, and he decides to rescue somebody that he used to know. He chases his dreams but murder, kidnap and blackmail catch up with him. Fate hasn't had its fill of Ger but will his natural survival instinct win out again?

Long forgotten but dramatic events from history have inspired fourteen short stories in this collection of new fiction from Irish writers. Drawn by the authors' imagination, these compelling stories reignite familiar historical themes once told through the satire of popular verse. Reinterpreted as an anthology, some tales are retold in their original setting while others are reimagined and adapted for today's world. Authors: R.A. Barnes, Maura Barrett, Jeanne Beary, Ilona Blunden, Phyllida Clarke, Eileen Condon, Nora Farrell, Majella Gorman, Patrick Griffin, Mary Healy, Orla Hennessy, Stella Lanigan, Rachel Nolan and Valerie Ryan.

A collection of stories by international bestselling author and Emmy-nominated screenwriter John Goldsmith. Do miracles really happen? Did Voltaire rise from the dead? Is our fate predestined? Are sex toys dangerous? The answers are to be found in this remarkable collection. Includes how-to advice on a number of topics: delivering practical jokes from beyond the grave; how best to murder an African despot; the secret of the world's best rabbit stew. From fantastic to factual, contemporary to historical, a mix of comedy, drama, intrigue and suspense.

The poet Shelley wasn't murdered. This book tells you whodunit. A group of glamorous English socialites spend the summer of 1930 holidaying on the Italian Riviera where the poet Shelley died in a sailing accident in 1822. To pass the time, they tell amusing stories, much as Shelley, Byron and their friends had done a century earlier. For their theme they choose the death of Shelley and the stories progress towards a solution to the "murder mystery". Yet is that truly what the stories are about? Or, despite their witty surface, are they a code for dark and dangerous secrets hidden behind an urbane façade? Guy Parrot, a naive young doctor, finds himself falling in love with the beautiful and enigmatic Julia, the truth of whose past flickers between the lines of the stories, tantalising both Guy and the Reader. Guy discovers that truth, and its terrible reality leads to two murders and the destruction of his happiness and sanity. In 1945, in the aftermath of war, Guy returns to Italy with the army and is given an opportunity to re-examine the events of fifteen years before. This time will he understand what happened and finally redeem himself? The Strange Death of a Romantic offers the Reader romance, comedy, suspense, and an intriguing solution to a historical Whodunit - but without the inconvenience of a crime.

MEET two unusual detectives. Ludovico - a young man who has had his testicles cut off for the sake of opera. And Monsieur Arouet - a fraudster, or just possibly the philosopher Voltaire.VISIT the setting. Carnival time in mid-18th century Venice, a city of winter mists, and the season of masquerade and decadence.ENCOUNTER a Venetian underworld of pimps, harlots, gamblers, forgers and charlatans.BEWARE of a mysterious coterie of aristocrats, Jesuits, Freemasons and magicians.DISCOVER a murder: that of the nobleman, Sgr Alessandro Molin, found swinging from a bridge with his innards hanging out and a message in code from his killer.Scherzo is a murder mystery of sparkling vivacity and an historical novel of stunning originality told with a wit and style highly praised by critics and nominated for the Booker Prize.

A disillusioned soldier looks for love. An exiled Emperor fears assassination. Agatha Christie takes a holiday. And George Bernard Shaw learns to tango. In the aftermath of World War I, Michael Pinfold a disillusioned ex-soldier tries to rescue his failing family wine business on the island of Madeira. In a villa in the hills the exiled Austrian Emperor lives in fear of assassination by Hungarian killers, while in Reid's Hotel, a well-known lady crime novelist is stranded on her way to South Africa and George Bernard Shaw whiles away his days corresponding with his friends, writing a one act play and learning to tango with the hotel manager's spouse.A stranger, Robinson, is found murdered and Michael finds himself manipulated into investigating the crime by his sinister best friend, Johnny Cardozo, the local police chief, with whose wife he is pursuing an arid love affair; manipulated, too, by Father Flaherty, a priest with dubious political interests, and by his own eccentric parent, who claims to have been part of a comedy duo that once entertained the Kaiser with Jewish jokes. Will Michael find love? Will the Emperor escape his would-be killers? Will any of the characters learn the true meaning of the tango?