1. Maeve Brennan – The Visitor
Short, sweet and devastating, Maeve Brennan’s ‘The Visitor’ was rediscovered after the author’s death in 1993. Brennan may have passed away in obscurity, though for a time during the 1940s, 50s and 60s, she was a mainstay at The New Yorker magazine where she produced celebrated short stories and dozens of woman-about-town non-fiction pieces about her adopted city. In ‘The Visitor’, we follow the travails of Anastasia King who has returned home to Dublin following the death of her mother in Paris. The writing is as crisp as a fresh layer of snow and the atmosphere as cold as a plunge into the Liffey.
2. Deirdre Madden – Molly Fox’s Birthday
After working quietly in the wings of Irish fiction for more than three decades, Deirdre Madden is only now starting to get the recognition she deserves. The author received the prestigious Windham Campbell Award in 2024 and ‘Molly Fox’s Birthday’ was featured in a countdown of the Top 100 Irish Books of the 21st Century, recently compiled by The Irish Times. It is one of Madden’s most understated, and perhaps most ambitious works, ostensibly tracking the ebbs and flows of a three-way friendship between a playwright, an actor and a historian over many years. As always, the Troubles conflict looms large in the background, though Madden’s skill as a writer never allows it to fully subsume the central premise.
3. Ciaran Carson – Shamrock Tea
Carson is well-known as a poet and traditional Irish musician. Less well-known are the half dozen novels he completed over the course of his career, for which he procured a Booker Prize longlisting for ‘Shamrock Tea’ in 2001. The book is a surreal, hallucinatory compendium of Irish mythology and Renaissance history, as its Belfast protagonist imbibes the titular shamrock tea only to find himself trapped inside Van Eyck’s ‘Arnolfini Portrait’. Along the way, he falls in love, encounters 20th Century philosopher and linguist Ludwig Wittgenstein and learns how to forge expensive works of art.
4. Darran Anderson – Inventory: A River, a City, a Family
Every once in a while a book comes along which contains not only all the ingredients to a good story, but mixes and presents them in near-perfect ratio. ‘Inventory’ is two parts memoir, one part travelogue, and reads like the product of a raucous night out with Seamus Deane, Georges Perec, WG Sebald and Robert MacFarlane. Anderson is a gifted psychogeographist, whose portrait of Derry and its people is the most vivid encapsulation of the Walled City since ‘Reading in the Dark'.
5. Leontia Flynn – Profit and Loss
Written against the backdrop of the 2008 financial crash, Co. Down poet Leontia Flynn’s third collection of poems is a smart, funny, at times eviscerating, analysis of Irish greed and the circus of consumerism and attainment that characterised so many of the “good times” during the Celtic Tiger. For anyone trying to understand the trajectory of change in the country over the last 20 years, you could do worse than to read ‘Profit and Loss’.
