Showing results by author "David McGowan" in All Categories

THE IRISH TIMES BESTSELLER 'A profoundly compassionate, educational reflection on death' - The Irish Times When death is a way of life . . . In A Life Among the Dead, David McGowan, Ireland's best known Funeral Director, and subject of the Award-winning Netflix documentary The Funeral Director...

The very strange but nevertheless true story of the dark underbelly of a 1960s hippie utopia. Laurel Canyon in the 1960s and early 1970s was a magical place where a dizzying array of musical artists congregated to create much of the music that provided the soundtrack to those turbulent times. But there was a dark side to that scene as well. Many didn't make it out alive, and many of those deaths remain shrouded in mystery to this day.

From Carnegie Medal winning author Anthony McGowan comes an environmental tale packed full of his signature grit, heart and humour, as Kyle and his grandad execute a plan to save the local beck. Kyle is less than happy about getting dumped at his eccentric old grandad’s on a Saturday afternoon...

But let’s not forget that the NW Mounted Police are in the midst of some big changes both inside and out. Politicians are threatening to do away with them, at least one law-breaker is proving hard to find, and changes within the force are being resisted to point of mutiny.

Nine short pieces of fiction constructed around 170 years of North American history and interspersed at intervals by fourteen poems. The first story is a fictional account of the first European to reach the Pacific coast of Canada. Following are fictional pictures of the winners and losers who became builders of North America and thus, eventually, all winners and though they didn’t know it or want it, builders of what exists today.

There is more than bad weather for Hank James to contend with as he rides in search of the land of his dreams and the woman of his heart. Portis Martin, manager of a large cattle company, has no use for the small homesteaders that have begun to pepper the area…and he isn’t afraid of using every dirty trick he knows to run them out.

Thomas Brash is trying to escape but knows he never will. No thinking person can escape from their past. Pursuing him is the memory of the family he lost to cholera. Perhaps he believes that traveling alone in a wild, dangerous land will end all his memories; there is no doubt he wishes to be alone. Whatever his intentions, the appearance of Frank Clement and the circumstances of that meeting upset those plans.

Call him a bounty hunter, a rangeland detective, an actor, a chameleon, a puzzle solver; whatever title you choose, Bob Morgan will find a way to reshape depravity, corruption and destruction into the manageable and acceptable. All that is necessary is to not expect too much, appreciate whatever improvement may be realized, and don’t look too closely at Morgan’s past.