St. Patrick's Day Author Picks

Sara Baume recommends

The Geometer Lobachevsky by Adrian Duncan

'It is almost impossible to choose between Duncan’s four beautiful novels. He writes with a very special kind of quiet wisdom and attention. The Geometer Lobachevsky shows us a familiar Irish landscape, a bog in the midlands, but as seen through the eyes of an exiled Russian mathematician in the 1950s.'

Photographer credit: Niamh Barry

Rory Carroll recommends

City of Bohane by Kevin Barry

'A decade since I read it and Kevin Barry’s debut novel City of Bohane still crackles somewhere in my brain. Set in 2053, it has rival gangs battling for control of a mythical west of Ireland town. The language fizzes and sparks while the characters pinball between murder, romance and philosophy.'

Photographer credit: Kevin Kheffache

Jan Carson recommends

Molly Fox's Birthday by Deirdre Madden

'I adore Deirdre Madden’s novel, Molly Fox’s Birthday. It’s a quietly powerful meditation on memory, friendship and identity. A woman’s house sitting for her famous actor friend, Molly Fox and, on her birthday, considers their years of friendship. Madden’s always a masterful observer of human nature with all its foibles and frailties and in Molly Fox, she’s on top form.'

Photographer credit: Jonathan Ryder

Rachel Connolly recommends

Murphy by Samuel Beckett

'Like all the books I love, I loved this one from the very first few lines, which announce a distinctive writer with a vivid personality and sense of humour: “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new”. Murphy is the story of the capers of Murphy, a seedy eccentric layabout who lives in a London boarding house. It’s a very funny, very squalid book.'

Naoise Dolan recommends

The Dirty Dust: Cré na Cille by Máirtín Ó Cadhain

'A 1949 modernist masterpiece. If you're taking on the Irish original, be aware that the main difficulty lies not in the vocabulary but in the non-linear structure and the fluidity between voices; Ó Cadhain was an experimental formal master, and we patronise him when we make his complexity simply about his Irish. I don't think he would have written an easy book in English, either. If you're reading it in translation, there are two that were published in 2015-16: Graveyard Clay by Liam Mac Con Iomaire and Tim Robinson and Dirty Dust by Alan Titley.'

Catherine Doyle recommends

Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer

'Artemis Fowl is the perfect blend of magic and villainy. Eoin Colfer creates a brilliant anti-hero in Artemis, throwing him headfirst into a hidden world of fairies, gadgets, and chaos. When I was eleven, it completely blew open the door to my imagination, because suddenly magic felt close to home!'

Photographer credit: Julia Dunin

Anne Enright recommends

Ulysses by James Joyce

'Ulysses by James Joyce is more fun than you think it is going to be. There is no need to plough through the thing, this is not something to add to your list of achievements in life. Read it for pleasure instead - a few pages now and then - and enjoy the wit and music of language unleashed. It will open your head.'

Photographer credit: Ruth Connolly

Wendy Erskine recommends

Good Behaviour by Molly Keane

'Good Behaviour by Molly Keane is a novel that I read every year. It’s told by Aroon, a 57 year old member of the aristocratic St Charles family. Crisp and shocking, its management of the unreliable narrator is exquisite.'

Photographer credit: Khara Pringle

Nikita Gill recommends

A Lick and A Promise by Imelda May

'A stunning poetry collection about womanhood, nature and heartbreak, Irish rockstar Imelda May creates a stunning narrative out of poetry which includes powerful pieces like “You Don’t Get To Be Racist and Irish”. A true revolutionary reclamation of self, spirit and sexuality, and one of my favourite modern poetry collections.'

Photographer credit: Robin Silas Christian

Sinéad Gleeson recommends

The Long-Winded Lady by Maeve Brennan

'Maeve Brennan’s The Long-Winded Lady is some of the greatest writing about navigating a city. From people-watching to parks, food to architecture, these micro essays – often only a page – brilliantly capture both the electricity and melancholy of mid-century New York, a city she described as ‘half-capsized’.'

Photographer credit: Bríd O’Donovan

Sarah Maria Griffin recommends

Little Passenger by Deirdre Sullivan (author), Jessica Love (illustrator)

'This is a deeply moving and visually astonishing rendering of the journey a parent and child take together towards birth. It is so surprising, and playful, while also containing an enormous amount of love. Sullivan writes like nobody else, and this is a masterpiece.'

Photographer credit: Bríd O’Donovan

Sally Hayden recommends

Reading in the Dark by Seamus Deane

'I first read Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark while at school, and it was an awakening in terms of how lyrical the English language can be. It is a coming of age story set in Derry; a book from the perspective of a child slowly learning a painful secret that will forever change his perception of his family.'

Photographer credit: Hani Alagbar

Chloe Michelle Howarth recommends

Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way by Elaine Feeney

'A woman on the edge, Claire, has abandoned her life in London to come home to Athenry. Living in her childhood home - just in front of an ominous old farm house - and working through grief, Claire unearths painful, defining memories of her family’s past. When her ex-fiancé appears in town, Claire must reconstruct her life while facing her family’s legacy.'

Adiba Jaigirdar recommends

The Cleaner by Mary Watson

'A captivating domestic thriller, which follows a cleaner who’s digging for secrets about the family that she’s working for, while harbouring some secrets of her own. Not only was this a page-turner that kept me on my toes, but was also a brilliant exploration of class and privilege.'

Photographer credit: Aleksandria Rudenko

Louise Kennedy recommends

I Could Read The Sky by Timothy O’Grady

'Asked to compose text to accompany stark, beautiful photographs that Steve Pyke had taken in Ireland and England on his old Rolleiflex camera, Timothy O’Grady wrote a novel. I Could Read the Sky is lyrical, fragmentary and downright exquisite, a book that evokes the Irish experience of emigration like no other work in literature.'

Ferdia Lennon recommends

The Happy Prince and Other Tales by Oscar Wilde

'Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince and Other Tales is, in many ways, where it all began for me as a reader. A collection of fairy tales without a single fairy-tale ending, the stories are beautifully written, strange and always memorable. Although I first read it as a child, it’s a book I still return to and am never disappointed.'

Photographer credit: Conor Horgan

John Patrick McHugh recommends

The Bend For Home by Dermot Healy

'The Bend for Home by Dermot Healy is a wonder and a pleasure: a zipping, hilarious, stylish, and brash memoir. The relationships and moments contained inside are so tender and plain odd that they could only be shovelled from real life. A joy to read and inhabit.'

Photographer credit: Bríd O’Donovan

Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin recommends

Elsewhere by Yan Ge

'Through its wild leaps across time and place, Yan Ge's short story collection puts a Dublin Londis in direct conversation with the fifth-century court of Confucius, as well as post-earthquake Sichuan, contemporary Stockholm, colonial Burma and elsewhere. These strange, beautiful and funny stories open up entirely new possibilities in Irish writing.'

Megan Nolan recommends

The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe

'I read this book the summer I left Ireland and moved to London. I was 25 and spent my underemployed days reading in hot parks; it was a good, strange season to encounter Patrick McCabe for the first time. This is a hysterical, manic rendering of an Ireland both bone-deep familiar and exhilaratingly alien. Francie's journeys veer from pathetic mundanity (encountering the shame of poverty and rural judgement) to morbidly thrilling (as he counters this subjection with creative and spectacular violence). If it was only the feat of technicolour brashness it is, it would still be a masterpiece, but it's frequently pierced by jarring moments of sincerity which move it into a different category, the one we might call genius, and which allows me to call it my favourite Irish novel.'

Photographer credit: Sophie Davidson

Louise O’Neill recommends

Amongst Women by John McGahern

'I read John McGahern’s Amongst Women for my Leaving Cert and every time I re-read it, I uncovered something new in its pages. Its quiet, unadorned language rings utterly true to life. Long before the phrase existed, McGahern captured toxic masculinity so perfectly: Moran’s resentment, his weighted silences, his inability to express any emotion except for anger, the damage his rage wreaks on his family. It is a masterclass.'

Photographer credit: Clare Keogh

Tanya Sweeney recommends

The Glorious Heresies by Lisa McInerney

'Formerly known as the brilliant Irish blogger Sweary Lady - you had to be there, if only for her singular take on Celtic Tiger Ireland - Lisa McInerney delivered The Glorious Heresies, an absolute belter of a debut, back in 2015. Amid the rubble of post-crash Ireland, we meet a motley crew of alcoholics, drug dealers, sex workers, criminal underworld figures, and, in one case, the mum who gave one of them up for adoption decades prior. This is a novel threaded with social malaise and unease, but absolutely popping with delicious, brutally black humour. It's delivered with emotion and pathos, and remains one of my true-blue favourites.'

Photographer credit: Ruth Medjber

Colm Tóibín recommends

Solar Bones by Mike McCormack

'Solar Bones by Mike McCormack is a novel, written in a single sentence, about a man in the west of Ireland, whose life is examined in fascinating detail, the most ordinary moments given a luminous aura. The landscape is evoked with great resonance, but it is the figure of Marcus Conway himself - his inner life - that makes this novel so powerful.'

Photographer credit: Albert Llop