There's a Book for That: Irish Literature
“I will arise and go now, for always night and day/I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;/While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey/I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”
– William Butler Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”
As St. Patrick’s Day approaches next week, and in celebration of Irish-American Heritage Month, we are showcasing great literature by Irish writers —classic, contemporary, fiction, nonfiction, and award-winning—offering a perfect foray to the Emerald Isle:
Fast-paced and funny. Scientific and tender. A literary thriller featuring Auks. Here is a story of one man’s growing humanity amidst famine and extinction. Told in the vernacular of the day, this novel-as-notebook features a 19th-century ornithologist on a remote Irish island.
Bringing together memoir, ekphrasis, and satire, plastic is based on Matthew Rice’s experience working in a plastic molding factory for ten years. Illustrating alienated twenty-first-century Irish labor in poetic form, plastic engages with the inflictions and implications of a “post-industrial,” “post-Troubles” society, all while weaving in depictions of factory work from literature, film, and the visual arts.
A brilliantly funny novel about friends, lovers, Ireland in chaos, and a young woman desperately trying to manage all three • “O’Donoghue deepens the familiar coming-of-age premise with riveting moral complications.” —People
The Irish language has thirty-two words for field. Among them are: Geamhar – a field of corn-grass • Tuar – a field for cattle at night • Reidhlean – a field for games or dancing • Cathairin – a field with a fairy-dwelling in it. In Thirty-Two Words for Field, bestselling Irish author Manchán Magan explores how Gaelic, a three-thousand-year-old lexicon, has imbued the natural world with meaning and magic, evoking a time-honored way of life.
A riveting, beautifully written, and poignant coming-of-age story about the heartrending complications of sibling relationships and the trauma of family secrets, perfect for fans of Kate Atkinson, Maggie O’Farrell, and Anne Enright. Set between the 1990s and the present day, from a farmhouse in Carlow to Trinity College, Dublin, Dinner Party is a dark, sharply observed debut told with sharp, elegant humor that thrillingly unravels into family secrets and tragedy.
Set on Ireland’s west coast in the 1970s and 80s, a captivating debut novel about a baby boy who is discovered on the beach beside a small fishing town, as told by the locals who fall under the boy’s transfixing spell. Both outrageously funny and incredibly moving, The Boy from the Sea is a dazzling novel from a major new voice in Irish literature.
From the award-winning author comes the gripping tale of one of the most scandalous murderers in modern Irish history. At once propulsive and searching, A Thread of Violence is a hard look at a brutal act, its subterranean origins, and the long shadow it casts.
From the five-time Booker Prize nominee and 2018-2021 Laureate for Irish Fiction, a virtuosic, profound novel exploring love, memory, grief, and long-buried secrets.
Recently retired policeman Tom Kettle is settling into the quiet of his new home, a lean-to annexed to a Victorian castle overlooking the Irish Sea. For months he has barely seen a soul, catching only glimpses of his eccentric landlord and a nervous young mother who has moved in next door. Occasionally, fond memories return of his family: his beloved wife June and their two children, Winnie and Joe. But when two former colleagues turn up at his door with questions about a decades-old case, one which Tom never quite came to terms with, he finds himself pulled into the darkest currents of his past.
Gathered by the renowned Irish poet, playwright, and essayist William Butler Yeats, the sixty-five tales and poems in this delightful collection uniquely capture the rich heritage of the Celtic imagination. Filled with legends of village ghosts, fairies, demons, witches, priests, and saints, these stories evoke both tender pathos and lighthearted mirth and embody what Yeats describes as “the very voice of the people, the very pulse of life.”
From the romantic ballad to the rebel song, from devotional Christian verse to revivals of ancient Celtic myth, poetry has long been Ireland’s most eloquent response to its turbulent and colorful history. Irish Poems gives us a dazzling selection from a long and distinguished poetic tradition, ranging from the earliest Gaelic bards up to the present. Organized around such themes as politics, religion, Gaelic culture, the Irish landscape, and matters of the heart, the poems collected here come from a wide range of writers old and new, including such literary giants as Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, Samuel Beckett, Louis MacNeice, Patrick Kavanagh, Paul Muldoon, Evan Boland, Seamus Heaney, and many more.
The first, shortest, and most approachable of James Joyce’s novels, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man portrays the Dublin upbringing of Stephen Dedalus, from his youthful days at Clongowes Wood College to his radical questioning of all convention. In doing so, it provides an oblique self-portrait of the young Joyce himself. At its center lie questions of origin and source, authority and authorship, and the relationship of an artist to his family, culture, and race.
This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, published for the novel’s centennial, is the definitive text, authorized by the Joyce estate and collated from all known proofs, manuscripts, and impressions to reflect the author’s original wishes.
Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple via the intervention of a hunchbacked Redemptorist nun, Cyril Avery is adrift in the world, anchored only tenuously by his heartfelt friendship with the infinitely more glamourous and dangerous Julian Woodbead. At the mercy of fortune and coincidence, he will spend a lifetime coming to know himself and where he came from – and over his many years, will struggle to discover an identity, a home, a country, and much more.
The bestselling debut that launched Tana French
As dusk approaches a small Dublin suburb in the summer of 1984, mothers begin to call their children home. But on this warm evening, three children do not return from the dark and silent woods. When the police arrive, they find only one of the children gripping a tree trunk in terror, wearing blood-filled sneakers, and unable to recall a single detail of the previous hours. Twenty years later, the found boy, Rob Ryan, is a detective on the Dublin Murder Squad and keeps his past a secret. But when a twelve-year-old girl is found murdered in the same woods, he and Detective Cassie Maddox—his partner and closest friend—find themselves investigating a case chillingly similar to the previous unsolved mystery. Now, with only snippets of long-buried memories to guide him, Ryan has the chance to uncover both the mystery of the case before him and that of his own shadowy past.
For more on these and other Irish titles visit the collection Irish Lit
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