Milkman

By Anna Burns

Winner of the Irish Times 100 Best Books of the Twenty-First Century
Winner of the Booker Prize 2018

In an unnamed city, where to be interesting is dangerous, an eighteen-year-old woman has attracted the unwanted and unavoidable attention of a powerful and frightening older man, ‘Milkman’. In this community, where suggestions quickly become fact, where gossip and hearsay can lead to terrible consequences, what can she do to stop a rumour once it has started? Milkman is persistent, the word is spreading, and she is no longer in control . . .

That They May Face the Rising Sun

By John McGahern

Joe and Kate Ruttledge have come to Ireland from London in search of a different life. 

In passages of beauty and truth, the drama of a year in their lives and those of the memorable characters that move about them unfolds through the action, the rituals of work, religious observances and play. We are introduced, with deceptive simplicity, to a complete representation of existence – an enclosed world has been transformed into an Everywhere.

Small Things Like These

By Claire Keegan

It is 1985, in an Irish town.

During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, faces into his busiest season. As he does the rounds, he feels the past rising up to meet him — and encounters the complicit silences of a people controlled by the Church.

Foster

By Claire Keegan

It is a hot summer in rural Ireland.

A girl is sent to live with foster parents on a farm, not knowing when she will return home. In the strangers’ house, she finds a warmth and affection she has not known before and slowly begins to blossom in their care. But in a house where there are meant to be no secrets, she discovers how fragile her idyll is.

Soldier Sailor

By Claire Kilroy

Exploring the clash of fierce love for a new life with a seismic change in identity, she vividly realises the tumultuous emotions of a new mother.

As her marriage strains and she struggles with questions of love, autonomy creativity and the passing of time, an old friend makes a welcome return – but can he really offer a lifeline to the woman she used to be?

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing

By Eimear McBride

Eimear McBride’s award-winning debut novel tells the story of a young woman’s relationship with her brother, and the long shadow cast by his childhood brain tumour.

It is a shocking and intimate insight into the thoughts, feelings and chaotic sexuality of a vulnerable and isolated protagonist. To read A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is to plunge inside its narrator’s head, experiencing her world at first hand. This isn’t always comfortable – but it is always a revelation.

A Collectors’ Edition of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is available (UK).

The Secret Scripture

By Sebastian Barry

Nearing her one-hundredth birthday, Roseanne McNulty faces an uncertain future, as the Roscommon Regional Mental hospital where she’s spent the best part of her adult life prepares for closure.

Over the weeks leading up to this upheaval, she talks often with her psychiatrist Dr Grene, and their relationship intensifies and complicates. Told through their respective journals, the story that emerges is at once shocking and deeply beautiful. Refracted through the haze of memory and retelling, Roseanne’s story becomes an alternative, secret history of Ireland’s changing character and the story of a life blighted by terrible mistreatment and ignorance, and yet marked still by love and passion and hope.

Normal People

By Sally Rooney

Connell and Marianne grow up in the same small town in the west of Ireland, but the similarities end there.

In school, Connell is popular and well-liked, while Marianne is a loner. But when the two strike up a conversation – awkward but electrifying – something life-changing begins.

Normal People is a story of mutual fascination, friendship and love. It takes us from that first conversation to the years beyond, in the company of two people who try to stay apart but find they can’t.

Girl

By Edna O’Brien

A young Nigerian woman, barely more than a girl herself, must learn to survive with a child of her own, in a world which seems entirely consumed by madness.

As she navigates a landscape of terrors and trials, ruled by Boko Haram, can she find a place of safety within a society blinkered by mistrust and denial?

Conversations with Friends

By Sally Rooney

Frances is twenty-one years old, cool-headed and observant.

At night she performs spoken word with her best friend Bobbi, who used to be her girlfriend. When they are befriended by Melissa, a well-known journalist who is married to Nick, an actor, they enter a world of beautiful houses, raucous dinner parties and holidays in Provence, beginning a complex ménage-à-quatre. But when Frances and Nick get unexpectedly closer, Frances is forced to honestly confront her own vulnerabilities for the first time.

Days Without End

By Sebastian Barry

After signing up for the US army in the 1850s, aged barely seventeen, Thomas McNulty and his brother-in-arms, John Cole, fight in the Indian Wars and the Civil War.

Having both fled terrible hardships, their days are now vivid and filled with wonder, despite the horrors they both see and are complicit in. Then when a young Indian girl crosses their path, the possibility of lasting happiness seems within reach, if only they can survive.

Intermezzo

By Sally Rooney

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties – successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women – his enduring first love Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude – a period of desire, despair and possibility – a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.

The Little Red Chairs

By Edna O’Brien

When a man who calls himself a faith healer arrives in a small, west-coast Irish village, the community is soon under the spell of this charismatic stranger from the Balkans.

One woman in particular, Fidelma McBride, becomes enthralled in a fatal attraction that leads to unimaginable consequences.

The Lesser Bohemians

By Eimear McBride

An eighteen-year-old Irish girl arrives in London to study drama and falls violently in love with an older actor.

While she is naive and thrilled by life in the big city, he is haunted by demons. The clamorous relationship that ensues risks undoing them both. At once epic and exquisitely intimate, The Lesser Bohemians is a celebration of the dark and the light in love.

Molly Fox’s Birthday

By Deirdre Madden

Dublin. Midsummer.

While absent in New York, the celebrated actor Molly Fox has loaned her house to a playwright friend, who is struggling to write a new work. Over the course of this, the longest day of the year, the playwright reflects upon her own life, Molly’s, and that of their mutual friend Andrew, whom she has known since university. Why does Molly never celebrate her own birthday, which falls upon this day? What does it mean to be a playwright or an actor? How have their relationships evolved over the course of many years?

The Colony

By Audrey Magee

Mr Lloyd has decided to travel to the island by boat without engine – the authentic experience.

Unbeknownst to him, Mr Masson will also soon be arriving for the summer. Both will strive to encapsulate the truth of this place – one in his paintings, the other by capturing its speech, the language he hopes to preserve.

But the people who live on this rock – three miles long and half-a-mile wide – have their own views on what is being recorded, what is being taken and what is given in return. Soft summer days pass, and the islanders are forced to question what they value and what they desire. As the autumn beckons, and the visitors head home, there will be a reckoning.

Walk the Blue Fields

By Claire Keegan

A long-haired woman moves into the priest’s house and sets fire to his furniture.

That Christmas, the electricity goes out. A forester mortgages his land and goes off to a seaside town looking for a wife. He finds a woman eating alone in the hotel. A farmer wakes half-naked and realises the money is almost gone. And in the title story, a priest waits on the altar for a bride and battles, all that wedding day, with his memories of a love affair. In her long-awaited second collection, Claire Keegan observes an Ireland wrestling with its past.

A Long Long Way 

By Sebastian Barry

One of the most vivid and realised characters of recent fiction, Willie Dunne is the innocent hero of Sebastian Barry’s highly acclaimed novel.

Leaving Dublin to fight for the Allied cause as a member of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, he finds himself caught between the war playing out on foreign fields and that festering at home, waiting to erupt with the Easter Rising.

The Blue Tango

By Eoin McNamee

‘At 2.20am in the morning of the 13th November 1952 the body of 19 year old Patricia Curran was carried into the surgery belonging to the family doctor.

At first Dr Kenneth Wilson thought she had been the victim of an accidental shooting. In fact a subsequent post-mortem revealed that she had been stabbed thirty seven times.’

Eoin McNamee’s wonderful novel, which is based on one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in recent history, is at once a gripping thriller and a danse macabre through a shadowy world of corruption and sexual intrigue – a darkly lyric narrative of white mischief in post-war Ireland, of false accusation and savage murder, presided over by the haunted, tragic figure of Patricia Curran.

Tenderwire 

By Claire Kilroy

Eva Tyne, an Irish violinist living and working in New York, collapses after her solo debut and is rushed to hospital. Still dazed after the incident, she finds herself embarked on a chaotic and dangerous odyssey. Leaving her steady partner, she quickly falls in love with a mysterious man, and shortly thereafter comes across a rare violin of dubious provenance, for which she must raise the required payment in cash in less than a week. But, haunted by the ghost of her father, racked with jealousy, and unsure whom she can trust around her, Eva soon finds herself playing a desperate psychological game as her desires threaten to destroy her.

Multitudes

By Lucy Caldwell

Multitudes is the beautiful debut story collection from the acclaimed, prize-winning novelist and playwright Lucy Caldwell.

From Belfast to London and back again the eleven stories that comprise Caldwell’s first collection explore the many facets of growing up – the pain and the heartache, the tenderness and the joy, the fleeting and the formative – or ‘the drunkenness of things being various’. Stories of longing and belonging, they culminate with the heart-wrenching and unforgettable title story.