Bolger's novels include Night Shift (1982), The Woman's Daughter (1987), The Journey Home (1990), Father's Music (1997), Temptation (2000), The Valparaiso Voyage (2001) and The Family on Paradise Pier (2005).

An indefatigable idealist, Eva strives to forge her identity while entangled in the fault lines of her children's unravelling lives.

As an eighteen-year-old factory worker in 1977 Bolger set up Raven Arts Press, which published early books by writers like Patrick McCabe, Colm Toibin, Sara Berkeley, Fintan O’Toole, Eoin McNamee, Kathryn Holmquist, Michael O'Loughlin, Sebastian Barry and Rosita Boland as well as the first English language translations of Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, and, in 1988, Paddy Doyle's groundbreaking memoir, The God Squad(1988), which is described in The Cambridge History of Irish Literature (page 468) as "an exposé of the institutional regime to which outcast children were subjected by religious caregivers".

Raven followed this up with another exposé, this time about Irish Industrial Schools in Patrick Galvin's memoir Song for a Raggy Boy(1991), which was later made into a 2003 film of the same name, directed by Aisling Walsh, which, according to The Cambridge History of Irish Literature (page 553) "focuses on how a lay teacher responds to the verbal and physical abuse doled out by the Christian Brothers in a reformatory school".

Bolger ran Raven Arts Press until 1992 when he co-founded New Island Books with Edwin Higel to continue to support new Irish writers.

The Irish Times said of it: "All 1990s life is there – drink, drugs, political corruption – all the words which have been repeated so often now that they have lost their power to shock.

The Goold-Verschoyle children are born into a respected freethinking Protestant family in a Manor House alive with laughter, debate and fascinating guests.