Book Launch: The Killer's Mark by M. W. Craven
2026-08-22 12:00 - 14:00 (Europe/London) | No Alibis Bookstore, 83 Botanic Avenue, Belfast, BT7 1JL, United Kingdom
Join us at No Alibis for the launch of The Killer’s Mark by M. W. Craven, published by Constable.
Book your free ticket here
Pre-order the book here
About the book:
A MONSTER. A MOTHER. A MURDER?
When Vice Admiral Boyer, RN (retd) died without leaving a will, his estranged daughter inherited his – not inconsiderable – estate.
Called home to sort through his belongings, she found an AegisBox – a tamper proof safe within a safe designed to self-destruct if anyone without the code attempts to open it. Unable to walk away without the truth, she uncovered something so horrifying it launched the biggest investigation in the National Crime Agency’s history. Five years later, Washington Poe is unwittingly, and unwillingly, sucked into its gravity…
Finally able to escape the authority they railed against, Washington Poe and Tilly Bradshaw are enjoying their new jobs as private detectives or – as the sign on their door says – ‘Gumshoes for Hire’. When a teenage girl walks into their office, looking for the mother she long believed to be dead, they agree to take the case. As Poe and Tilly investigate the girl’s claims, they find themselves drawn into a murky world of trafficking, pornography and prostitution.
Will they be able to help the girl find her mother, or will the dark forces at work, who will stop at nothing to protect themselves, get there first…

Damian Smyth Folly Lane Book Launch
2026-09-09 18:00 - 19:00 | No Alibis Bookstore, 83 Botanic Avenue, Belfast, BT7 1JL, United Kingdom
Join us on 9th September at 6pm to celebrate the publication of
Folly Lane by Damian Smyth
This is a free event.
Book your space here
Folly Lane – a novel, is a biographic novel skilfully weaving its weft of narratives and private text, all drawn from the public world amongst the warp of a modern world in flux, tethered by histories of order chaos and failure. The novel reaches from imperial Rome to 21st century Ireland.
Folly Lane, a place in Downpatrick, a ‘street’, is a cul-de-sac, a pathway, a side road – never a thoroughfare, but a mis-step- so maybe a metaphor , a fiction.
Nothing there is owned, not even ‘autobiography’ where “I” is a population of multiple selves, every ampersand reveals another diorama and even formulaic utterances – prayers, invocations, testimonies, mission statements, visions, strategies reveal mesmerising, ‘enchanting’ patterns of expression.

Memorable and telling – moreover, useful.

Within this fiction of self we discover stories, narratives, messages and lessons underpinned by irony, hyperbole and fable in a miasma of satire,
Lord knows, even if we don’t look for one, there is inevitably a moral at work…

Book Launch: Sensation by Colin Graham
2026-09-23 18:00 - 19:30 | No Alibis Bookstore, 83 Botanic Avenue, Belfast, BT7 1JL, United Kingdom
Join us in the bookshop for an event with Colin Graham to celebrate the launch of Sensation, published by PVA Books.
Book your free ticket here.

About the book:
A train journey prompts a flow of memories – a perfect childhood garden, a father obsessed with catching animals, the background noise of the Troubles – sensations retold, felt again at second hand. Weaving through early-morning milk runs, the effects of redundancy, intense evangelical meetings, dressing up, and the desire for literary enlightenment, these essays contemplate how our experiences make us who we are.
Rooted in his recollections of growing up in 1980s Belfast, Colin Graham traces connections across his childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, and tells the story of his fractured relationship with his father. In a vivid series of reconstructions, Sensation examines the entangled elements of a life.
Colin Graham’s books include Ideologies of Epic, Deconstructing Ireland, and (as @BorderIrish) I am the Border, So I am. His book Northern Ireland: 30 Years of Photography won the Michael J. Durkan Prize and was an Observer Photography Book of the Month. His fiction and memoir-essays have appeared in the Dublin Review, the Edinburgh Review,and elsewhere, and he was formerly editor of the Irish Review. Graham presents the My Identity podcast for ARINS and the Royal Irish Academy, and farms sheep in the Dublin mountains. He is Professor of English at Maynooth University.
‘Poised, elegant, textured, and deeply insightful. The author’s inner life, with all its private intimacies and anguishes, is conveyed with a prose style that is both graceful and contained’ * Niamh Campbell
‘An erudite and deeply humane study of class, work, faith, nature, art, and, most of all, of the acutely moving estrangement of father and son. These supremely articulate and evocative essays are as alert to the processes of memory as they are to the moments, people, and places they examine. Here is the sensate world, from fish and birds to Shostakovich and sheep farming, given with tenderness and in luminous detail’ * Stephen Sexton’Composed with precision and clarity, Colin Graham’s pristine sentences set the past glimmering vividly. A transporting, unforgettable experience’ * Doireann Ní Ghríofa

Book Launch: Stations - Louise Kennedy
2026-09-24 19:00 - 20:00 | Great Hall, QUB, Great Hall, Queen's University Belfast, Belfast, BT7 1NN, United Kingdom
We are delighted to be selling books at the launch of Louise Kennedy’s second novel, Stations. The event will take place in the Great Hall at Queen’s University Belfast at 7pm on Thursday 24th September. To RSVP please e-mail cormac.kinsella@gmail.com
About Stations:
Róisín and Red meet as teenagers in their small Irish hometown in 1982. Brilliant, sharp-tongued and born to slip through the cracks, Red’s reputation for trouble precedes him – but Róisín finds herself swept up in his storm, and soon their connection deepens. When a brush with the law pushes Red into a corner, he escapes their town to start a new life in England.
As the years pass, they remain tethered to one another, a fragile thread holding their once fierce friendship together. When Róisín arrives in London, the promise of freedom, of reinvention, and of finding her dear friend calls. But searching for Red leads Róisín to a truth darker than she could have imagined: when you go looking for someone you may uncover parts of yourself along the way that you’d rather stayed buried.
And Red – bright, beautiful Red – might not want to be found at all. Stations is a devastating story of love and friendship, and a tender portrait of the choices we blithely make when we are young, unaware that the consequences will reverberate throughout our lives.

Book Launch: No Vacancy by Jan Carson
2026-09-29 17:30 - 19:00 | No Alibis Bookstore, 83 Botanic Avenue, Belfast, BT7 1JL, United Kingdom
Join us on Tuesday 29th September at No Alibis Bookstore to launch Jan Carson’s new collection No Vacancy, published by No Alibis Press.
Reserve your free place here
About the book:
Where do touring writers go when all the books have been signed and the crowd has dispersed? To an extraordinary place of haunted pools and sacred shower curtains, a one-eyed man in a funeral suit and a foyer of powdery-scented grandmothers. The hotel rooms in this new collection of micro-fiction by Jan Carson are, like art, ‘neither here nor concretely there’. Carson opens doors to the uncanny with humour tuned keenly to the strange and surreal, but the reader is left with a profound sense of familiarity at the human condition so tenderly revealed.
Preorder a copy here

Paperback Launch: One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This - Omar El Akkad in Conversation with Michael Magee
2026-09-30 20:00 - 21:30 | Mandela Hall. Queens University Belfast, Mandela Hall .77 University Road, Belfast, Antrim, BT7 1NF, United Kingdom
Join us at the Mandela Hall for the launch of the paperback edition of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This with author Omar El Akkad, who will be in conversation with Michael Magee. This is a ticketed event, and a portion of the proceeds will be donated to MAP: Medical Aid for Palestinians.
Buy your ticket here on TicketSource.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is an urgent and necessary reckoning about what it means to live in the West today. This is a book for those that have tired of moral emptiness. This is a book for everyone who wants something better.
Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager and now lives in the United States. He is a two-time winner of both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award and the Oregon Book Award. His books have been translated into 13 languages.
Michael Magee is a graduate of the creative writing PhD programme at Queen’s University, Belfast. His writing has appeared in Winter Papers, The Stinging Fly, The Lifeboat and The 32: The Anthology of Irish Working-Class Voices. Close to Home is his first novel. It was shortlisted for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize 2023 and won the Rooney Prize for Literature 2023.

Oliver Jeffers - The World of Oliver Jeffers Book Tour 2026
2026-12-20 12:00 - 14:00 | No Alibis Bookstore, 83 Botanic Avenue, Belfast, BT7 1JL, United Kingdom
Oliver Jeffers – The World of Oliver Jeffers Book Tour 2026
FREE TICKETS HERE
This is a free event but booking is essential
The World of Oliver Jeffers Tour – Public signing
Join us in-store as we have the wonderful Oliver Jeffers here signing copies of his brand new children’s book A Day Off School Illustrated by Kevin Waldron and the new paperback edition of
There’s a Ghost in This House.
A free art print will be gifted with either book bought. Additional publishing by Oliver will also be available to buy on the day.
A Day Off School tells the story of Herbie, who stays home from school when he has the sniffles. At first, Herbie is delighted to have a day all to himself. A day to play Space Blasters uninterrupted, do some painting and to read his book in bed! But, by lunchtime, Herbie has done everything on his list and soon – despite his best efforts – his thoughts turn to school. What if something really fun is happening? Like an extra playtime or a dog loose in the corridors? What if Herbie is missing out?
There’s a Ghost in This House brings a unique and disarmingly witty take on the traditional ghost book that will go far beyond Halloween. Hello, come in.
Maybe you can help me? A young girl lives in a haunted house, but has never seen a ghost. Are they white with holes for eyes? Are they hard to see? She’d love to know! Step inside and turn the pages to help her on an entertaining ghost hunt, from behind the sofa, right up to the attic. With lots of friendly ghost surprises and incredible mixed media illustrations, this unique and funny book will entertain young readers over and over again!
