Irish Fiction

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 …

On the evening of December 11, 1920, a production of The Gondoliers is in full swing at the Cork Opera House when word comes through that the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries are rampaging through the streets and setting b…

Ghost Mountain, is a simple fable-like novel about a mountain that appears suddenly, and the way in which its manifestation ripples through the lives of characters in the surrounding community. It looks at the uncertain fragile se…

Danny Hook is a directionless twenty-something year old fresh out of therapy. Dealing with his disappointed family and dead-end career, he's sure things couldn't get much worse, until a drink-driving accident leaves his best frien…

The explosive literary sensation: a mother faces a terrible choice as Ireland slides into totalitarianism  On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her …

The Barnes family are in trouble.Until recently they ran the biggest business in town, now they’re teetering on the brink of bankruptcy – and that’s just the start of their problems. Dickie and Imelda’s marriage is hanging by a th…

Set in Dublin's Liberties, Estelle Birdy’s explosively original debut Ravelling channels the energies and agonies of young men let loose in the city, their city, navigating the tumultuous trajectory of youth and young manhood, whe…

Cork Stories, edited by Madeleine D’Arcy and Laura McKenna, is a collection of short fiction set throughout the neighbourhoods of Cork city and county by writers who live or have lived in Cork. Some of the stories present vivid po…

Colm Tóibín’s The Heather Blazing details the life of Eamon Redmond, a judge in Ireland’s high court, a man remote from his wife, his son and daughter and, at least outwardly, from his own childhood. The life he has built for hims…

A modern classic work of Irish literature, this award-winning novel is an exploration of love, art and identity.  This was the night train to Barcelona, some hours before the dawn. This was 1950, late September.I had left my husba…

One house, three strangers... Tessa. Activist, 69 years young. Not ready to sell up her big seaside house, but she knows a little help around the place would do wonders.Conn. Looking for a quiet place to heal after a family trag…

Helen’s beloved brother Declan is dying. Now, she must join her mother and grandmother in a crumbling old house by the sea, three generations calling an uneasy truce after years of strife, to be by his side. Together with Declan’s…

Sean is back. Back in Belfast and back into old habits. Back on the mad all-nighters, the borrowed tenners and missing rent, the casual jobs that always fall through.Back in these scarred streets, where the promised prosperity of …

It’s 1990 in London and, after the death of a young girl on an estate, the finger of suspicion is pointing at one reclusive Irish family: the Greens. At their heart sits Carmel: beautiful, other-worldly, and once destined for a fu…

Sally Diamond cannot understand why what she did was so strange. She was only doing what her father told her to do, to put him out with the rubbish when he died. Now Sally is the centre of attention, not only from the hungry media…

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…

Juno loves Legs. She always has, ever since she fought the bullies for him in their first encounter at school.Growing up on the estate is tough for them both, but as they emerge into the possibilities and underground parties of 19…

Traditional hedgerows are rapidly vanishing from our countryside. With their disappearance, we lose not only their flora and fauna but also the tales and folklore that have always surrounded them. This book records these stories b…

Tom Kettle, a retired policeman, and widower, is settling into the quiet of his new home in Dalkey, overlooking the sea. His solitude is interrupted when two former colleagues turn up at his door to ask about a traumatic, decades-…

Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry can be considered to be Carleton’s greatest work. It went through a number of transformations before the ‘definitive edition’ was published in 1842-44. This edition was the last that Carle…

Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry can be considered Willian Carleton's greatest work. It went through a number of transformations before the 'Definitive Edition' was published in 1842-44. This edition was the last that Car…

1950s Dublin. The body of a young woman is discovered in a lock-up garage, an apparent suicide.But pathologist Dr Quirke and Detective Inspector Strafford soon suspect foul play. The victim's sister returns from London to help the…

The second book from the “exact and poetic” (New York Times) author of critical smash Young Skins, winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35, Homesickness  is an emotionally resonant…

Forgotten Beauty is an anthology of Irish love poetry from over fifteen hundred years of Irish writing, presenting the work of famous and lesser known writers. The poems express the loves and longings of Irish poets in language th…

The first thing Vanessa Carvin does when she arrives on the island is change her name. To the locals, she is Willow Hale, a solitary outsider escaping Dublin to live a hermetic existence in a small cottage, not a notorious woman o…

What does Ireland's nature poetry say about us as a people? How does it speak to us of our past, our inheritance, the values to which we aspire? What clues lie within its language that connect us to our deeper selves and our place…

You don't fully appreciate how large a donkey's head is until it's beside you in a Fiat Punto. The view in my mirror was furry and violent. I was driving blind.Driving with a donkey stuffed in the back seat; jackdaws pecking brain…

RTÉ Radio 1’s Sunday Miscellany is an Irish institution, a programme that has provided comfort, joy and entertainment to hundreds of thousands of listeners for over half a century. Arranged in calendar months and spanning the seas…

Nealon, just released from jail, returns to his family home in the West of Ireland. He finds an empty house. It seems the world has forgotten that he even existed.The one exception is a persistent caller, a man who seems to know e…

Lady Augusta Gregory's Irish Myths and Legends, or Gods and Fighting Men as it was first titled in 1904, is an essential collection of Irish myths, legends and folk tales gathered by Gregory from Irish oral story tellers at the cl…