A book of wisdom and life. Welcome to Alice Taylor's garden: 'Just inside the gate, hand-painted on a rickety piece of timber, is a little sign: Miracles only grow where you plant them. I saw it in a garden centre and could not resist it. This garden is full of my lack of resistance. I have no in-depth gardening knowledge and I work on impulse. 'My gardening expertise, acquired through trial and error, is nurtured by the unbelievable pleasure that I have discovered in simply digging the earth. Where does that satisfaction come from? Maybe buried deep in each of us is the secret need to cultivate the soil. Digging the earth breathes life back into us.' A reflective and uplifting account by Alice Taylor of her love of nature and gardening.

Alice has known, loved, and lost many people throughout her life. Here she talks about her special people, her memory of what meant so much to her about them. She remembers her husband, father and mother, a beloved sister, her little brother Connie, and many others. She tells how she coped with the emptiness she felt when they died, of the seeming impossibility of moving on with life after such deeply felt loss, when time stood still. This book is a sharing - it lets the reader in on a story and celebration of life in its intimacy, its small, precious moments. When we experience grief, sharing in someone else's story can help us more than anything, and in the hands of master storyteller Alice Taylor, we may find our own solace and the space to remember our own special people.

Alice Taylor remembers her childhood home - the farm with all its tools and animals, the home with its equipment for living, its daily challenges, constant hard work, and its comforts too. She describes the huge open fireplace where all the cooking was done, where the big black kettle hung permanently from the crane over the flames; here the family sat in the evenings, talking, knitting, going over the events of the day, saying the rosary. She experienced the sow being brought indoors to have her precious brood of bonhams. She recalls the faithful, beloved horses and their wonderfully varied outfits - one set of tackle for each job they did on the farm; the ritual of lighting the oil lamps - from the fancy one in the parlour to the tiny one under the Sacred Heart picture; the excitement of threshing day and the satisfaction of a good harvest - the stations, the neighbours, and later the local dancehall and cinema. All the jobs and tools of a way of life long gone...

Alice Taylor brings the reader with her on her 80th birthday year. Alice had a big birthday on the horizon, the village was about to celebrate many milestones, and she had just received the gift of a book focusing her on the art of living well. So she decided to write about her year as it unfolded, to keep a journal of the big events, and record the twists and turns normal life brings to all of us in just one year. But 2018 turned out to be far from normal, with storms, snow blizzards, blistering sun, severe drought and water shortages. She describes the challenges of all these dramatic weather changes. Alice began the year wondering how she would feel about reaching eighty. She was pleasantly surprised to discover that it was just another milestone on a journey that is still varied and interesting. Here she writes about these feelings, and the many pleasant and challenging events of her eightieth year.

Back in the last weeks of February, which now feels like a hundred years ago, we here in Innishannon were busy planning what was termed 'The Big Rake Off' of the dead grass on the long sloping bank beside the road coming into the village. Happily unaware of forthcoming events, we were totally focused on creating our wild flower bank: to get something like this going you need a 'metheal', a word which prior to the corona virus was unknown to anyone under 40. Then everything changed ... Exploring the themes of community, family and personal wellbeing, Alice Taylor examines a world changed utterly by the arrival of a once-in-a-century infectious disease. Heart-warming, reflective yet always practical, Alice is a wonderful guide in a world unlike the one we lived in only a few short months ago.

Let Alice Taylor encourage you to live in the now, to really live your experiences and to treasure the special moments in your life. With Alice as a guide, explore the steps and ways to live a conscious life and focus on the goodness of the world around us. Alice's beautiful and captivating writing is an act of mindfulness in itself, and she shares her favourite moments in life, encouraging us to ponder our own. Alice also inspires the reader to be attentive to the here and now and embrace moments as they arise. A beautiful and enchanting book by a bestselling and celebrated author.

Join Alice Taylor this Christmas as she welcomes us into her home and shows us the traditions of her family's Christmas. Alice looks back over her past Christmases and prepares for this Christmas. With all the warmth of a winter fire, Alice takes us through the exciting preparation for Christmas from getting the perfect tree to baking those very crucial puddings and pies. Alice also give us a intimate insight into her Christmas Eve and Christmas day rituals and talks us through her favourite Christmas recipes. She tells how the Christmas foods were made when she was a child, using the bastable and the range, and how she prepares them now. Alice loves Christmas and her huge enjoyment of the season fills this book with pleasure and delight.

The third volume of Alice Taylor's unique memoir of life in the Irish countryside. A massive bestseller with universal appeal.

Alice Taylor takes a look back at the well-used schoolbooks she used in her youth in the 1940s and 1950s. Flicking through the pages of the books and recalling poetry and prose she learned at school, Alice reminisces about these texts, how she related to them and how they integrated with her life on the farm and in the village. In her warm, wise way, Alice reflects on poems and stories on topics ranging from birds, trees and nature to fairy tales and legends, and ties them in with her own knowledge and memory of traditional country life. Containing the text of the poems that readers will remember from their own school days, and evocatively illustrated with photographs of the school books and Alice's notes on them, as well as nature, flora, fauna and objects associated with schools of old, this is a reminder of childhood days and a treasure trove of memory.

Alice Taylor's gripping sequel to The Woman of the House.At Mossgrove, the Phelan family farm, long-time hired hand Jack plays peacemaker as widow Martha Phelan battles her young son, Peter, who wants to modernize the farm. Tensions on the home front are bitter enough, but at the Conway farm across the river, more trouble is brewing. Slovenly Matt Conway feels trapped and abuses his wife, Biddy. Spurred on by a misguided belief that the Phelans got the best of him in a loan to buy land, he keeps vigil at a fence post plotting revenge ...

Alice Taylor takes a nostalgic, loving look back to a family firmly rooted in tradition and humour and - in particular - the Christmas traditions of her childhood. With her unerring knack of bringing her readers into her home, her stories of a childhood Christmas are rich, warm and amusing, giving a wonderful insight into life as it was.

'We walk in the footprints of great women,women who lived through hard times on farms,in villages, towns and cities.The lives of these women are an untold story.This book is a celebration of the often forgotten"ordinary" women who gave so much to our society.' Alice Taylor In her eagerly-awaited new book, Alice salutes the women whose energy and generositymade such a valuable contribution to all our lives. '[It] warmed my heart and reminded me of the value of family, friendship and community... I was enthralled... wonderful.' Irish Independent on And Time Stood Still

A classic memoir from Ireland's favourite storyteller. Here Taylor follows To School Through The Fields with these equally captivating recollections of family life in pastorial County Cork. Infused with wit and lyricism, the story centres on the 1950's when the author and her friends were teenagers. She describes the past vividly and without complaint as the years of hard labour for herself, parents and siblings, were also filled with fun in the close knit community.

In a series of vignettes of life in her village, Alice Taylor reasserts the priorities of public space and local community. The Parish evokes and explores the positive values of community, which could be renewed and reinvigorated for a present and future that achieves harmony between comfort and the pressing need to respect the environment.

'A delightful evocation of Irishness and of the author's deep-rooted love of the very fields of home' Publishers Weekly Alice Taylor's classic account of growing up in the Irish countryside, the biggest selling book ever published in Ireland, beautifully reproduced with photographs from Alice's life. If ever a voice has captured the colors, the rhythms, the rich, bittersweet emotions of a time gone by, it is Alice Taylor's. Her tales of childhood in rural Ireland hark back to a timeless past, to a world now lost, but ever and fondly remembered. The colorful characters and joyous moments she offers have made To School Through the Fields an Irish phenomenon, and have made Alice herself the most beloved author in all of the Emerald Isle. A must-have for fans of Alice Taylor.