Book Hub Publishing

16/11/2025

'Night Owl on a Winter Eve Flight' by Walter King Stone,c. 1925.

16/11/2025

Some Sunday listening 🎧 ☕🚶‍♀️

Listen back to drive time in October where I had a few minutes to talk about my story. It was one of many that day as they held an awareness week around the topic if infertility and pregnancy loss from both the female and male perspective.

I start at 42 minutes: https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/liveline/2025/1014/1538547-liveline-tuesday-14-october-2025/

There are so many aspects to my story, it's so hard to get it all across in a very short time slot. The other stories are all so interesting too. Thank you
For the opportunity to help open up these conversations.

That's exactly what my book UNDELIVERED aims to do.

Link to book in bio. Amazon is currently not working for the paperback. You can buy the paperback from my publishers, link also in bio.

Laura 💖

14/11/2025

Many congratulations Sarah Butler At Home

📚✨ Book Signing Alert! ✨📚

We’re thrilled to welcome lovely local author and cook to The Castle Bookshop this Saturday from 1–3pm! 🎉

Come along, say hello, and grab your brand new copy of "The Complete Cookbook"- the perfect Christmas present for the foodie (or budding chef!) in your life. 🎄🍴💛

Don’t miss your chance to get your copy personally signed by Sarah- we can already smell the delicious inspiration wafting from these pages! 😋📖

13/11/2025

How lovely to feature on Sarah Butler At Home ‘book quartet’…Always great fun of an edit journey with Sarah. Sue x

13/11/2025

"Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see."
Mark Twain

Artist: Kira Graphics

Paired by Whispers from the Heart

13/11/2025

Artist Rachel Grant

09/11/2025

Fields of Light and Rain
The lane is no more than a thought
between two hedges
and my boots making parish-sized sounds,
along the ditch where cans go to rust.

Gate latch cold as a bit in the mouth,
I shoulder through—ash-drip, briar-snag—
into the gleam.

Last night’s rain still beads
on nettle and dock,
each drop a kind of
poor-man’s silver,
enough for anyone
with eyes to spend.

Now fields go on doing what fields do:
taking the light, returning it altered—
green and slick as memory,
each blade of grass a thin bright prayer.

A crow climbs a skitter of clouds above
a tin-roof rain rhythm on the shed—
a drum of heaven practicing scales—
and the dog turns twice into himself,
chasing his tail.

You came laughing, coat unbuttoned,
letting the rain write its wet rosary
down your hair. I read every bead.

Now the years have turned the soil of us,
you could say nothing has changed,
and you’d be almost right,
and I think, as the wind bends the rushes,
that maybe all we ever own
are these small, fleeting moments—
a path glimmering after rain,
the warmth of a word half-spoken,
the long, slow echo of love.

Let the cities keep their cleverness.
I’ll stand knee-deep in the ordinary
until it breaks into light again.

By Kevin McManus, from his forthcoming book, "The Dark Night and the Dawn"

09/11/2025

*My Books* (1919) 📚
~ Honor C. Appleton~ English~ b. in Brighton, she studied art at the Kensington Schools also, Frank Calderone's School of Animal Painting and the Royal Academy of Arts in London. She started her career with 'Mrs. Bad Ginger' and went on to illustrate the series of Josephine Books, among numerous others.. hundreds in all. She developed a very delicate water colour style that seemed to capture the innocent world of children and their adventures. She was greatly influenced by British artists Kate Greenaway and Annie French. Her water colour paintings were exhibited at the Royal Academy and there was a memorial exhibition of her work in 1952 at the Hove Library on the South East Coast of England~
1879 - 1951

09/11/2025

REVIEW of 'A SAVAGE SILENCE'
©John Ennis, PhD. November, 2025.

A Savage Silence is a major production by gifted filmmaker Darragh O’Rourke who, luckily for us, lives in Westmeath. The actors in his 90-minute feature film are midlands-based too, some appearing for the first time on screen. Talented, they play themselves without pretension.

The locale is at once familiar, not often seen on film though, like the streets of Mullingar and surrounding midland countryside. Lakeland country. Saplings recur bending to and fro, tossed about in storms, but they are not broken. Complementary scenes blend in from St. Julian’s, Malta, and Brittany.

A Savage Silence is a film about “the stagger and recovery of spirit”. Most people have experienced this state at some time in their lives, so they will empathise immediately with the work. The film focuses on healing and the healing process. The film’s unhurried pace informs the healing process. Generational switches occur with ease in seamless fashion.

What lights the fuse of Darragh’s film is loss. Loss of someone very close, loss felt so acutely it seems like a betrayal, a destruction of trust. “I don’t love you anymore”. That bombshell to the psyche! The ultimate cry of a human at death’s door, one that’s at the heart even of Christendom, “Why have You forsaken me?”

It’s the story of one Jonathan Mills told with authenticity. The savage gutting silence of loss is examined and humanised before our eyes, as well as the healing and transformative power of new love, new hope, a new resilience.

The film might be viewed as a response to Irish philosopher Richard Kearney’s classic Touch Recovering our most vital sense (Columbia University Press 2021). In fact, it draws on the novel of the same name as the film by psychotherapist Rory Hafford. Rory, a writer of lyrics, novels, with CDs to his credits, provides the haunting musical soundtrack.

Intensely memorable in its realistic, if under-played quietist dynamic of dialogue, visuals and music, A Savage Silence by Darragh O’Rourke was warmly received at its premiere in Mullingar Charity Variety Group Theatre in Forest Park on Friday 24 October last. The film deserves to be widely seen, and seen again, and experienced. Darragh who wrote, filmed and directed the work describes it as a musical-drama. To quote the film maker directly, “I believe the film will prove inspirational for everyone who views it”. An understatement.