After losing two young sisters in a house fire, in an accident caused by drink and cigarettes, Rós and her family leave their home to live in a new council house. In the local community school she befriends Cormac, a middleclass boy who is trying to come to terms with his own problems; and encounters bullies who are every bit as bad as the bullies she has left behind in her school.
1914, somewhere in the southwestern Pacific, Captain Rasputin’s sailing boat comes upon a man strapped to a raft adrift in the ocean: Corto Maltese. Corto and Rasputin are working for the Monk, the mysterious lord of the South Sea pirates — a man who carries a dark secret close to his heart. As England and Germany prepare for the Great War at sea, we’re drawn into an adventure and in a world inhabited by cannibals and battleships, heroes and traitors, friends and madmen, and by a beautiful young woman who would charm the most sea-hardened sailor on ‘The Banks of the Salt Seas’.
Rebekka Vogelzang, a young Dutchwoman, is fighting to save the Irish language, which she has learnt on the job in an Irish-speaking café in Galway. She puts her heart and soul into every scone she bakes and every cup of espresso she makes because she knows the very salvation of the language depends upon it. But who will save Rebekka? A novel about idealism, loyalty, love and ... coffee.
