Francis Hagan: 7 books

The following Companion outlines in some detail the works collected together as The Ostraka Plays, together with some observations behind the writing process and a larger overview of the theatre these plays occupy. Each play is discussed in some detail and all are grouped together under the rubric...

This is the first play in a series entitled the Ostraka Plays which delve into the grotesque; the mysterious; and the bizarre. In Unearth, an unknown alien planet is visited by a small archaeological team tasked to uncover its fate. The litter of a once vast civilisation lies everywhere while above...

Wave after wave of refugees stumble along a wild shore studded with forgotten ruins and unremembered statues - these are the echoes and souls of abandoned gods and demi-gods who are condemned now to wander on that last edge before oblivion - and in their shadow, as they play out their final dances, a strange god appears to mock them all even as the wild sea moves in to sweep them all away.

Here, in Constantinople, a skinmaker hides an imperial map inside the folds of his own flesh, marionette-makers carve divine models based upon the newly dead, a senator is lured into a trap by assassin-mimes, a woman spends her days tearing herself out of all the books she can find, a map-maker draws...

Spain, 1949, now exhausted after a bitter Civil War and adrift from a Europe devasted by WWII,and Bill Alexander arrives fresh from University to catalogue and order an ancient collection of dusty books. Here, in the manorial estate of the blind 'Averroes', skirted by his daughter, Mira, Bill Alexander...

In 1645, Basing House fell to the veterans of Cromwell's New Model Army amid a sack unparalled in ferocity and terror. Among the survivors of the Royalist defenders was Inigo Jones, the great Architect and Theatre Designer of the Court. In a fit of pique, he gathers the remaing Players in the ruins...

The thirteenth edition of the successful textbook The Economy of Ireland should be of interest to not just third-level students but a wide lay audience. The story of the Irish economy, at the heart of the euro zone has been one of the most remarkable in the developed world in the last twenty years....