With St. Patrick’s Day on March 17, we thought a post featuring books from Ireland written by Irish authors that you’ve probably never heard of was a fitting celebration.
This isn’t a list of famed Irish authors everyone knows. Instead, this list of 6 books features outstanding writers from the Emerald Isle whose books aren’t bestsellers—at least not yet.
Happy reading!
Struggling to cope with urban life—and life in general—Frankie, a twenty-something artist, retreats to her family’s rural house on “turbine hill,” vacant since her grandmother’s death three years earlier. It is in this space, surrounded by countryside and wild creatures, that she can finally grapple with the chain of events that led her here—her shaky mental health, her difficult time in art school—and maybe, just maybe, regain her footing in art and life.
As Frankie picks up photography once more, closely examining the natural world around her, she reconsiders seminal works of art and their relevance. With “prose that makes sure we look and listen,” (Atlantic) Sara Baume has written an elegant novel that is as much an exploration of wildness, the art world, mental illness, and community as it is a profoundly beautiful and powerful meditation on life.
“Baume writes lovely prose about unimaginable pain. A clear-eyed, beautiful rendering of a woman struggling against despair.” —Kirkus Reviews
A Paris Review Staff Pick: a sweeping, Dickensian story of a young girl on a life-changing journey across 19th-century Ireland on the eve of the Great Famine.
Early one October morning, Grace’s mother snatches her from sleep and brutally cuts off her hair, declaring, “You are the strong one now.” With winter close at hand and Ireland already suffering, Grace is no longer safe at home. And so her mother outfits her in men’s clothing and casts her out.
When her younger brother Colly follows after her, the two set off on a remarkable odyssey in the looming shadow of their country’s darkest hour. The broken land they pass through reveals untold suffering as well as unexpected beauty. To survive, Grace must become a boy, a bandit, a penitent and, finally, a woman—all the while afflicted by inner voices that arise out of what she has seen and what she has lost.
Told in bold and lyrical language, Grace is an epic coming-of-age novel and a poetic evocation of the Irish famine as it has never been written.
“The prose flows like good Irish whiskey and compels readers to keep drinking in Lynch's words; sometimes so poetic they read like a James Joyce novel." ―RT Book Review
”When you finish, you feel like saying 'wow.' Under your breath perhaps, but don’t be hard on yourself if you shout it out, because this is a work of staggering beauty and deep insight.... Sentence after sentence pulls you up in your tracks and has you rereading.”―Sydney Morning Herald
A vital, tender, death-haunted work by one of Ireland’s most important contemporary writers, Solar Bones is a celebration of the unexpected beauty of life and of language, and our inescapable nearness to our last end.
It is All Souls Day, and the spirit of Marcus Conway sits at his kitchen table and remembers. In flowing, relentless prose, Conway recalls his life in rural Ireland: as a boy and man, father, husband, citizen. His ruminations move from childhood memories of his father’s deftness with machines to his own work as a civil engineer, from transformations in the local economy to the tidal wave of global financial collapse. Conway’s thoughts go still further, outward to the vast systems of time and history that hold us all. He stares down through the “vortex of his being,” surveying all the linked circumstances that combined to bring him into this single moment, and he makes us feel, if only for an instant, all the terror and gratitude that existence inspires.
“Solar Bones is exceptional indeed: an extraordinary novel by a writer not yet famous but surely destined to be acclaimed by anyone who believes that the novel is not dead.” —The Guardian
“Combines the spare poetry of The Road with the dizzying pace of 28 Days Later.”
Remember your just-in-cases. Beware tall buildings. Always have your knives.
Raised in isolation by her mother and Maeve on a small island off the coast of a post-apocalyptic Ireland, Orpen’s life has revolved around training to fight a threat she’s never seen. More and more she feels the call of the mainland, and the prospect of finding other survivors.
But that is where danger lies, too, in the form of the menace known as the skrake. Then disaster strikes. Alone, pushing an unconscious Maeve in a wheelbarrow, Orpen decides her last hope is abandoning the safety of the island and journeying across the country to reach the rumored all-female fighting force that battles the skrake.
But the skrake are not the only threat…
Sarah Davis-Goff's Last Ones Left Alive is a brilliantly original imagining of a young woman's journey to discover her true identity.
“Written in sparse, affecting prose, and reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, this is a fiercely feminist, highly imaginative novel.” ―The Guardian
“It is not only the distinctly Irish element, however, but the immense quality of the writing that stands this novel a clear head and shoulders above the rest. It's as much an exploration of inexpressible loss as it is a rocket-paced page-turner, as much a coming-of-age story as it is a testament of resilience in impossible circumstances. And it left me feeling almost as queasy as Orwell did.” ―Irish Independent
Enter the small, rural town of Glanbeigh, a place whose fate took a downturn with the Celtic Tiger*, a desolate spot where buffoonery and tension simmer and erupt, and booze-sodden boredom fills the corners of every pub and nightclub.
Here, and in the towns beyond, the young live hard and wear the scars. Amongst them, there's jilted Jimmy, whose best friend Tug is the terror of the town and Jimmy's sole company in his search for the missing Clancy kid; Bat, a lovesick soul with a face like “a bowl of mashed up spuds” even before Nubbin Tansey's boot kicked it in; and Arm, a young and desperate criminal whose destiny is shaped when he and his partner, Dympna, fail to carry out a job.
In each story, a local voice delineates the grittiness of post-boom Irish society. These are unforgettable characters rendered through silence, humor, and violence.
“The stories blend moments of horror with moments of hilarity, shocks of joy with shocks of despair, it’s a thrill to be alive to hear him.”―Paris Review
“A sustained and brilliant performance ... [It] is Colin’s mastery of characterisation and his seemingly endless ability to surprise us with the poetry and linguistic inventiveness of his prose that elevates these stories into deftly crafted works of art that are a pleasure to read from start to finish.”―Short Story Ireland
*As noted by Celtic Countries, the Celtic Tiger refers to Ireland’s economy from the mid-1990s to the late-2000s, a period of rapid economic growth fueled by direct foreign investment when it was transformed from one of the poorest countries in Western Europe to one of the wealthiest. The boom was dampened by a subsequent property bubble which resulted in a severe economic downturn.
When grandmother Maureen Phelan is surprised in her home by a stranger, she clubs the intruder with a Holy Stone. The consequences of this unplanned murder connect four misfits struggling against their meager circumstances.
Ryan is a fifteen-year-old drug dealer desperate not to turn out like his alcoholic father, Tony, whose feud with his next-door neighbor threatens to ruin his family. Georgie is a sex worker who half-heartedly joins a born-again movement to escape her profession and drug habit. And Jimmy Phelan, the most fearsome gangster in the city and Maureen’s estranged son, finds that his mother’s bizarre attempts at redemption threaten his entire organization.
Biting and darkly funny, The Glorious Heresies presents an unforgettable vision of a city plagued by poverty and exploitation, where salvation still awaits in the most unexpected places.
“Fiendishly hilarious.” —The Times
“The novel’s searing take on contemporary Cork is elegantly leavened by empathy and humor. . . . McInerney’s characters are vibrantly-drawn, richly-rendered, and wonderfully full of surprises.” —The Boston Globe