Books

No News at Throat Lake: by Lawrence Donegan (now golfing correspondent for The Guardian). Hilarious account of a journalist's attempt to live and make friends in Creeslough and work at the Tirconaill Tribune. A bit blokish but a great read nonetheless.

Plays by Brian Friel, for example Dancing at Lughnasa, Translations or The Home Place.  Dancing at Lughnasa was apparently based on the life of a family of sisters Friel knew in Glenties.

The Ordnance Survey Letters Donegal, Michael Herity Ed. Four Masters Press Dublin 2000. The letters written by mapmaker John O'Donovan in 1835 which were an important source for Brian Friel's play Translations.

The Slow Breath of Stone: A Romanesque Love Story by Pamela Petro Fourth Estate, £20. The author follows the journeys of eccentric Romanesque Harvard scholar Kingsley Porter and his wife Lucy through SW France -- and is surprised to find that the journey brings her eventually to Donegal, to Glenveagh, the castle bought by Porter in the nineteen thirties, and Inishbofin island, where his life ended mysteriously.

Geology of North Donegal: Geological Survey of Ireland 1997, by C.B.Long and B.J.McConnell ISBN 1-899-702-14-8.

Children of the Dead End, by Patrick MacGill (and also but less rivetting, The Rat Pit) -- These are novels, but really memoirs, about his life on the road in Donegal and Scotland after he left his home for the hiring fair in Strabane in the early 1900's, by Patrick MacGill, after whom the annual summer school in Glenties takes place each year. New Island Books, Dublin 2001

Islanders: Exquisite novel about life on a Donegal island in the nineteenth century by Peadar O'Donnell (1893 - 1986)