Books from Ireland

In a small Irish town in 1982, Róisín and Red form an intense bond as two sharp-minded teenagers who feel out of place in their own lives. Red is rebellious and troubled, while Róisín carries the pain of growing up with an absent father and a difficult home life. When Red’s encounter with the law forces him to leave Ireland for England, their connection survives across distance, becoming a fragile thread linking them through the years. Eventually, Róisín travels to London to visit her estranged father and finds Red again, moving into his squat in Pimlico. But the life he has chosen is darker and more complicated than she imagined, and the pair gradually drift apart. Even as their paths diverge, Róisín remains haunted by her unfulfilled passion for him. Moving between Ireland and London over decades, Stations explores first love, addiction, friendship, and the lasting consequences of youthful choices. It asks whether we can release the people who shaped us—and whether learning to love someone else begins with learning to love ourselves.

After the isolation of the pandemic, Irish writer and artist Sara Baume discovers a painting at a small exhibition in West Cork that captivates her. Its creator, Mollie Douthit, is an American artist living alone in a remote coastal cabin. The two women form an unexpected friendship, finding common ground in their artistic practices, love of nature, solitary habits, and complicated relationships with other people. They establish a monthly ritual of sharing soup and swimming in the Atlantic, while Mollie prepares a new exhibition inspired by memories of her childhood. As their friendship deepens, Baume begins writing about Mollie’s paintings, exploring whether words can capture the elusive, dreamlike quality of visual art. But life soon disrupts their quiet routines, bringing loss, pain, and uncertainty. Blending memoir, art criticism, and intimate reflection, Opening Night examines how friendship shapes our understanding of ourselves, our memories, and the world around us. It is a thoughtful meditation on creativity, solitude, and the surprising connections that make life meaningful.

Ireland, 1865. On a windswept peninsula overlooking the Atlantic, Tomás and his ten-year-old son, Liam, work on the ambitious Ordnance Survey project to map the entire country. Still haunted by the devastating Great Hunger, Tomás is determined that his maps will preserve a record of the tragedy that transformed Ireland. But when an unsettling encounter in an ancient woodland disrupts his work and changes his behaviour, Liam finds himself struggling to understand his father while facing the daunting task of completing their mission. As their family’s story unfolds, buried secrets, lingering ghosts, and the enduring power of the Irish landscape reveal how the past continues to shape the present. Spanning generations and exploring the consequences of colonisation, famine, and displacement, Land is a sweeping historical novel about survival, family, and the profound connections between people and the places they call home. Maggie O’Farrell weaves Irish history with folklore and intimate human drama, creating a meditation on memory, belonging, and the ways landscapes preserve stories that history cannot erase.

In Cork, Ireland, a derelict Victorian psychiatric hospital is being transformed into modern apartments. For one woman, known as the Reader, the abandoned building becomes the beginning of an extraordinary investigation into the lives of the women who once lived behind its walls. Through archival records and the casebooks of Dr Lucia Strangman, one of Ireland’s earliest female asylum doctors, she discovers the stories of women whose suffering was recorded, interpreted, and too often misunderstood by the medical establishment. As the Reader becomes increasingly immersed in their histories, the boundaries between past and present, personal experience and historical memory begin to blur. Blending biography, memoir, historical research, and elements of the ghost story, Said the Dead gives imaginative life to forgotten women while examining grief, mental illness, motherhood, and the ethics of recovering voices that history has silenced.

When aspiring actress Frida Slattery meets ambitious theatre director John Reddan in a Dublin pub in 2005, neither can imagine how profoundly they will shape each other’s lives. Frida is struggling to establish herself as an actress, while John is beginning to make a name for himself as a writer and director. Recognizing each other’s creative potential, they embark on an artistic partnership that brings them professional success, critical acclaim, and an increasingly complicated personal relationship. Over the next sixteen years, their intertwined lives carry them from Dublin to London, New York, and Los Angeles. As their careers evolve and their personal lives become more complicated, the boundaries between artistic collaboration, friendship, ambition, and romantic desire grow increasingly difficult to navigate. Success brings new opportunities, but also betrayal, disappointment, and heartbreak. Despite marriages, separations, and the changing circumstances of their lives, Frida and John remain connected in ways neither can fully explain. With wit and psychological insight, Ana Kinsella explores the relationship between art and identity, examining how creative partnerships can inspire us while also threatening to define us. This expansive literary novel is ultimately a story about love, ambition, artistic expression, and the difficult process of finding one’s own voice.

In 1999, Saoirse Byrne appears to have found the life she always dreamed of. Living on Ireland’s rugged Donegal coast, she shares a peaceful home with her partner, Daithí, and their two daughters. A talented artist, she pours her love for her family and her appreciation of the surrounding landscape into her paintings. But beneath this seemingly idyllic existence lies a secret: Saoirse has been living under a stolen identity since fleeing the United States as a teenager. She has crossed an ocean to escape a traumatic childhood and the dangerous people connected to her past, determined never to return to the life she left behind. When an exhibition in Dublin brings her unexpected acclaim, the attention threatens to expose the carefully constructed identity that has allowed her to survive. As memories of her troubled upbringing and the choices she made to escape resurface, Saoirse must confront the possibility that the past she has tried to bury could destroy the family and freedom she has worked so hard to build. Moving between Ireland and the United States, this suspenseful literary novel explores trauma, reinvention, the complexities of love, and the fragile boundary between survival and deception. It asks whether it is possible to escape one’s past—or whether true freedom requires facing it at last.

Jay has built a new life in London with her girlfriend, keeping her complicated past at a safe distance. But when she learns that her beloved older brother, who died in an accident, may be declared a Catholic saint, she is forced to confront the family and faith she left behind. Both tender and sharply funny, this novel explores queer identity, grief, and the complicated legacy of the Catholic Church in Ireland, asking who gets to decide how a life is remembered.

Intermezzo follows two Irish brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek, as they struggle to navigate life after the death of their father. Peter, a successful Dublin lawyer in his thirties, appears to have everything under control, but beneath his confident exterior he is struggling with grief, insomnia, and complicated relationships with two women: Sylvia, his former partner, and Naomi, a much younger university student. Ivan, a socially awkward twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player, finds himself drawn to Margaret, an older woman whose own life is undergoing a period of uncertainty. Despite their shared loss, the brothers find it increasingly difficult to understand one another. Their differences in temperament, age, and approach to relationships create tension as they attempt to make sense of their changing lives. Through intimate psychological portraits and shifting perspectives, Rooney explores grief, masculinity, love, sibling relationships, and the ways people seek connection during periods of emotional upheaval. The title refers to an intermezzo, a musical interlude, reflecting a transitional moment in the brothers’ lives as they confront loss and reconsider who they want to become.

Prophet Song follows Eilish Stack, a mother of four living in Dublin as Ireland descends into authoritarianism. When a newly empowered secret police force begins targeting political opponents, Eilish’s husband, a trade unionist, disappears into state custody. As restrictions tighten and violence spreads, Eilish struggles to protect her children while navigating a society where ordinary institutions can no longer guarantee safety or justice. Her efforts to maintain a semblance of normal life become increasingly desperate as neighbours disappear, public services collapse, and the possibility of escape grows more complicated. Lynch presents the crisis through Eilish’s increasingly claustrophobic perspective, capturing the emotional exhaustion of a parent forced to make impossible choices. The novel explores authoritarianism, displacement, and the cost of resisting political oppression, showing how democracy can erode gradually until private life becomes inseparable from the struggle for survival.

On a summer Friday in Dublin, office worker Cathal watches the hours pass, looking forward to the weekend. Yet his thoughts keep returning to Sabine, the French woman he was once engaged to—and to the small moments and disagreements that destroyed their relationship. As the evening unfolds, details of their time together reveal a troubling portrait of a man whose rigid expectations and lack of generosity gradually undermine the possibility of love. The 2023 collection brings together three stories: So Late in the Day, The Long and Painful Death, and Antarctica. Across these unsettling encounters, Claire Keegan examines the power dynamics between women and men, exposing how entitlement, indifference, and the threat of violence can shape intimate relationships. With extraordinary precision and emotional restraint, she finds profound meaning in ordinary conversations and seemingly insignificant gestures. The result is a quietly devastating exploration of gender, intimacy, and the harm people can inflict without ever recognising themselves as cruel.

A new mother known as Soldier loves her baby son, Sailor, with a fierce intensity—but motherhood has transformed her life in ways she could never have anticipated. Exhausted by sleepless nights, endless childcare, and the relentless demands of caring for a young child, she struggles to recognise the woman she used to be. While her husband continues to work late and pursue his career, Soldier finds herself increasingly isolated, questioning the unequal division of parenting and the disappearance of her own ambitions. Told as an intimate address to her son, Soldier Sailor captures the contradictions of early motherhood: tenderness and resentment, overwhelming love and desperate frustration, joy and despair. When an encounter with someone from her former life offers a glimpse of the person she once was, Soldier begins to wonder whether she can reclaim part of herself without abandoning the child she adores. With sharp humour and unflinching honesty, Claire Kilroy explores the invisible labour of motherhood and the struggle to preserve one’s identity while caring for another person.

The Bee Sting follows the Barnes family, whose seemingly comfortable life in a small Irish town begins to unravel under the weight of financial troubles, personal secrets, and emotional isolation. Dickie, the father, once ran a successful car dealership but finds his business collapsing during an economic downturn. His wife, Imelda, struggles with the consequences of her past and the loss of the glamorous life she once imagined for herself. Their teenage daughter, Cass, is torn between academic ambitions and the desire to escape her family, while her younger brother, PJ, quietly confronts his own fears and insecurities. Through the shifting perspectives of its four central characters, Murray explores the gap between how families present themselves and what happens behind closed doors. Blending dark humor with tragedy, the novel examines inherited trauma, denial, and the consequences of seemingly small decisions. Set against the backdrop of contemporary Ireland, The Bee Sting is an expansive portrait of a family struggling to hold itself together as its world falls apart.