My newest book – a thrilling account of novelist Ayn Rand’s impact in Silicon Valley and beyond – is available as an ebook or in hardback direct from Palgrave Macmillan or through Amazon.
You can buy my memoir and my poetry collection right here on this website for only €8, including free shipping to anywhere in the world. And the guide to Dublin I edited with Katherine Farmar is now only €5! Don’t miss out on this opportunity – if you don’t buy my books I’ll have to burn them, and book-burning is a sin!
All copies of the three books below are signed – once I make it big, they’ll be worth millions!
Two in a Million by Ben Murnane (Dublin: A&A Farmar, paperback, 2008)
‘Riveting and beautifully written’ – Sunday Independent
‘Fascinating and emotionally charged… peppered with humour and an almost unsettling level of honesty… This is a remarkable story of an erudite young man’s fight for life’ – Evening Echo, ****
Ben is a normal, bright, ambitious student. The only difference between his life and yours is that he has a rare blood disease – Fanconi anaemia – which gives sufferers a life expectancy of 22 years. At the age of 16 Ben became the first person in Ireland to have a revolutionary type of bone marrow transplant. But getting through it wasn’t easy: he suffered a psychotic episode which made him unable to recognise his doctors, his parents… And, before the transplant even began, he had to tell the girl he loved that he had only a 50 per cent chance of survival. Two in a Million describes what it’s like to live with a life-threatening illness, to undergo a life-saving procedure, to recover slowly and try to live normally as a student in Dublin. Told with humour and honesty, this is a remarkable story.
Feather Silence: Poems by Ben Murnane (Dublin: A&A Farmar, paperback, 2010)
‘At their best [these poems] have a little something of the simplicity of the early Kavanagh… Emotionally direct, with “the ordinariness/all hearts/demand”, the poems in Feather Silence, aside from their value as poems, are also fascinating documents in a remarkable journey of survival, testaments in every line to a brave, unbowed, enduring heart – anchored in the ordinary world, yet not afraid to dream.’ – Eamon Grennan
Feather Silence is a deeply personal collection that charts the years after Ben Murnane was diagnosed with one of the rarest genetic diseases in the world, Fanconi anaemia: his many agonising days in hospital; those first nervous steps into the world of love; the joy and the pain of memories and the little details of life.
Written alongside Ben’s memoir Two in a Million, these poems shed new light on the remarkable story of illness, friendship and love told there. These are the thoughts that occupied a young man whose life was on the brink, and they read with insight and beauty.
