A PLETHORA of new books were released this year by some of Ireland’s most esteemed Irish authors.
Any one of them would make the perfect stocking filler for a loved one, or even better, a Christmas treat for yourself.
We’ve rounded up a selection of them to inspire your next bookshop purchase.
So, sit back, relax and have a quick flick through some of the best Irish literary releases of 2024…
Intermezzo by Sally RooneyIntermezzo, by Sally Rooney
Faber, £18
Intermezzo is the fourth, much-anticipated novel by celebrated Irish author Sally Rooney.
Rooney has become something of a global phenomenon in recent years, after the television adaptation of her 2018 book Normal People became an overnight hit when it aired on the BBC during the Covid-19 lockdown of 2020.
Author Sally Rooney (Pic: Kalpesh Lathigra)The series is also responsible for launching the career of one Paul Mescal, who has gone on to achieve epic levels of stardom, not least taking the title role in the recently released Ridley Scott sequel Gladiator II.
Rooney’s inimitable writing style sees her focus on people, identities, relationships and family ties and her latest offering stays true to form.
In Intermezzo she introduces us to brothers Peter and Ivan Koubek, who seem to have little in common but are entirely bound by grief following their father’s death.
“Intermezzo is a story of brothers and lovers, of familial and romantic intimacies, of relationships that don’t quite fit the conventional structures,” publisher Faber’s Alex Bowler said.
“After three miraculous books, Sally Rooney’s millions of readers will recognise the beauty and insight, the pain and hope that radiates from this new novel,” he added.
“But it marks an exquisite advance, too, in the work of a writer who seems so attuned to our lives, our hearts and our times.’
Last month, Rooney was named Author of the Year at the Irish Book Awards 2024 in Dublin.
Wild Houses, by Colin Barrett
Penguin, £9.99
Colin Barrett’s debut novel was longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize.
The Co. Mayo native, who has previously released two collections of short stories, was one of 13 authors vying for that prize, with the judges describing the work as “a slow-burn study of character and fate that's also an edge-of-your-seat thriller”.
Located in his home county, Wild Houses contrasts an idyllic view of rural Ireland with a darker side of the Emerald Isle.
Set over three days against the backdrop of the Salmon Festival in Ballina, the story centres on a drugs feud that spills over into violence and an ugly ultimatum.
Barrett didn’t win the Booker but he continues to win critical acclaim – and his was the only Irish entry to make this year’s much coveted longlist.
His first book, the short story collection Young Skins, won the Guardian First Book Award, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature when released in 2014.
One of the stories in the book, Calm with Horses, was adapted into an award-winning 2019 film of the same name starring Barry Keoghan and Cosmo Jarvis.
Barrett’s second short story collection, Homesickness, made the New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year and was a Book of the Year in Oprah Daily and the Irish Times.
The Alternatives, By Caoilinn Hughes
Oneworld Publications, £9.99
Writer Anthony Doerr describes Caoilinn Hughes as “a massive talent”, and when you get your hands on The Alternatives you will see why.
This is the story of four brilliant sisters, orphaned in childhood, who scramble to reconnect when the eldest disappears into the Irish countryside.
Now in their thirties, the sisters barely speak, each too busy carving out impressive careers.
But when Olwen – reluctant matriarch, lodestar and, of late, zealous consumer of gin – abruptly disappears, her sisters are cast back together to find her, whether she likes it or not.
Born and raised in Galway, Hughes admits to writing most of the book in Connemara, which she claims is “the most beautiful place in the world”.
Author Caoilinn Hughes (Pic: Amitava Kumar)The Queen’s University Belfast graduate is also the author of Orchid & the Wasp, which won the Collyer Bristow Prize and was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award following its publication in 2018.
In 2020 she released The Wild Laughter, which won the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award and was longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize.
More recently Hughes was the Oscar Wilde Centre Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin and a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library for 2023-2024.
Seaborne by Nuala O’Connor
New Island, £14.99
Bestselling and award-winning Irish author, Nuala O’Connor returned this year with the intimate and thrilling portrayal of the life of 18th-century Irish pirate, Anne Bonny.
Set in 1703 in Kinsale, Co. Cork, Seaborne follows the life of Anne Coleman - who is the illegitimate child of a local lawyer and his maid and is disguised as ‘Anthony’ to protect reputations.
However, fixated on boats and the sea, Anne/Anthony struggles to fit in, and her devoted mother fears for her fiercely independent and impulsive daughter.
When their secrets are exposed, the family emigrates to the new colony of Carolina, but this fresh start eventually brings devastating loss and stifling responsibilities.
With her sixth novel,Galway-based O’Connor returns to her usual high standards and showcases once again her talent for telling true stories.
Her previous work includes Nora, a novel about Nora Barnacle and James Joyce, which was a Top 10 historical novel in the New York Times.
With Seaborne she brings to life another fascinating woman from Ireland’s history.
The Woman Behind the Door, By Roddy Doyle
Penguin, £9.99
Roddy Doyle has been writing novels for nearly 40 years.
From The Barrytown Trilogy – namely The Commitments (1987), The Snapper (1991) and The Van (1991) – to this year’s The Woman Behind the Door, the Dubliner never fails to succeed when putting pen to paper and creating tales about everyday life.
His latest work focuses on sixty-six-year-old Paula Spencer, a mother, grandmother, widow and domestic abuse survivor who is finally living her life.
It is the third time Doyle has written about Mrs Spencer, who featured in The Woman Who Walked in Doors in 1996, which was followed by Paula Spencer in 2006.
When we meet her this time, she has a job at the dry cleaners which she enjoys, a man with whom she shares what she wants, friends who see her for who she is, and four grown children.
Despite its ghosts, Paula has started to push her past aside, that is until her oldest daughter comes knocking with issues of her own.
Author Roddy DoyleThe book is Doyle’s twelfth novel and remains as hard-hitting and emotive as ever
The has also published two collections of short stories, and Rory & Ita, a memoir about his parents.
In 1993 he won the Booker Prize for his book Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.
Long Island, By Colm Tóibín
Pan Macmillan, £20
Literary legend Colm Tóibín pleased many of his fans this year with the release of a sequel to his 2009 hit Brooklyn.
Brooklyn is largely deemed Tóibín’s breakout novel, which won him the Costa Novel of the Year Award and saw him shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
It won global critical acclaim and went on to be adapted for the silver screen in a film of the same name which featured Saoirse Ronan in the lead role of Ellis Lacey.
Long Island picks up the story 20 years on, with Ellis still in the US, where she is now married with teenage children.
But life does not stay simple for long, as in true Tóibín style, drama and family turmoil soon comes a-knocking.
With several novels now under his belt, including The Master and The Magician, in Long Island the Wexford-born author remains at his best.
The Heart in Winter, By Kevin Barry
Canongate, £16.99
Limerick-born author Kevin Barry released his fourth novel this year.
In The Heart of Winter he tells the tale of two lovers who go in the run in Montana.
His hero is an Irishman living among fellow Irish migrants in the mining town of Butte in the 1890s.
Just as he feels his life is heading nowhere fast, Polly Gillespie arrives in town as the new bride of the devout mine captain Long Anthony Harrington.
A thunderbolt love affair takes spark between the pair and they strike out west on a stolen horse, moving through the badlands of Montana and Idaho.
Author Kevin BarryFellow author Anne Enright has described the book as “an absolute belter”.
Previously Barry wrote Night Boat to Tangier, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and There Are Little Kingdoms, which won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.
He has also won the Goldsmiths Prize, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, and the Lannan Foundation Literary Award.
Our London Lives, By Christine Dwyer Hickey
Atlantic Books, £9.99
Multiple-award-winning author Christine Dwyer Hickey is back with her tenth novel.
Set in 1979 in the vast and often unforgiving capital, Our London Lives reveals two Irish outsiders who find one another while both seeking refuge.
Milly is a teenage runaway, and Pip is a young boxer full of anger and potential who is beginning to drink it all away.
Over the decades their lives follow different paths, interweaving from time to time, often in one another’s sight, always on one another’s mind, yet rarely together.
Forty years on, Milly is clinging onto the only home she’s ever really known while Pip, haunted by T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, traipses the streets of London and wrestles with the life of the recovering alcoholic.
“Dark and brave, this epic novel offers a rich and moving portrait of an ever-changing city, and a profound inquiry into character, loneliness and the nature of love,” publishers Atlantic Books explain.
Author Christine Dwyer Hickey (Pic: Bobby Harvey)Hickey's novel The Cold Eye of Heaven won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award in 2012, was nominated for the 2013 International Dublin Literary Award, and shortlisted at the 2011 Irish Book Awards for novel of the year.
In 2018, she won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction for her novel The Narrow Land.
Jailbreak: Great Irish Republican Escapes, 1865–1983, By James Durney
Merrion Press, £17.99
The IRA’s 1983 breakout from the Maze Prison was the biggest jailbreak in UK penal history.
It was the culmination of a long tradition of escape bids by Irish republican prisoners, who saw it as their moral duty to escape, attempting to do so in increasingly daring and audacious ways.
Spanning the period 1865–1983, James Durney’s collection features escapes on land, air and sea, including bomb blasts, tunnel escapes, mass breakouts and helicopter airlifts.
Each chapter of the book features a history-altering jailbreak, such as Éamon de Valera’s cunning rescue from Lincoln Jail in 1919, the ‘Greatest Escape’ of 112 anti-Treaty prisoners from Newbridge Barracks in 1922 and the epic helicopter airlift of IRA leaders from Mountjoy Prison in 1973.
To date, Durney has written over twenty books on Irish national and local history.
He works at Kildare County Archives and Local Studies.
Carl Frampton: My Autobiography, with Paul D Gibson
Merrion Press, £14.99
Belfast’s Carl ‘The Jackal’ Frampton is no ordinary boxer.
He has headlined multiple sell-out world championship bouts on both sides of the Atlantic, winning warious world titles in the process and his dedicated army of fans have traversed the globe to be ringside throughout it all.
But Frampton’s popularity far exceeds the traditional adulation for a sporting icon; he is regarded as a symbol of hope and unity by both sides of the sectarian divide in Northern Ireland.
In this autobiography, he reveals the most personal aspects of being a fighter; of fears and doubts, of exhilaration and devastation, of friendship and animosity.
He also recounts for the first time his high-profile, acrimonious split with Barry McGuigan, in devastating and revealing detail.
Frampton speaks openly and passionately, not only about boxing, but about his country, how far it has come and the problems it faces. This is a uniquely intimate account of a true modern-day sporting great and a local hero like no other.
The fast-paced memoir from a boxing hero features a foreword by Late Late Show host Patrick Kielty.
And one to look out for in 2025...
The City Changes its Face, By Eimear McBride
Faber, £20
Eimear McBride is set to release a new novel in just a matter of months.
Born in Liverpool but raised in the west of Ireland, McBride, who won multiple literary prizes for her debut A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, will release her fourth novel The City Changes Its Face in February 2025.
Faber will publish the title, which is described as “an intense story of passion, possessiveness and family”.
McBride, widely deemed a literary trailblazer for her unique style of writing, has set her latest book in London in 1995.
Her protagonists Eily and Stephen, are aged nineteen and thirty-nine and living in flat in Camden.
The story follows their relationship over a two-year period.
“Eily and Stephen retrace the course of their two-year romance now their world is merging with the common place and ties from the past are intruding,” the publishers explain.
“Stephen has reconnected with his long-lost teenage daughter Grace.
“Eily thinks about the future and their flat feels different. The city changes its face.”
They add: “Intimate, experiential, and immersive, The City Changes Its Face explores a passionate love affair tested to its limits.”
Author Eimear McBrideMcBride's previous work includes the Goldsmiths Prize and Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction-winning A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, released in 2013, The Lesser Bohemians, which won the 2017 James Tait Memorial Prize, and Strange Hotel, which was published in 2020.
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