In a few days everyone will be Irish and blarney-talking and drinking and shillelagh dragging and wearing o’ the green, so why not try your luck with these Irish reads?
FICTION
THE HEART’S INVISIBLE FURIES BY JOHN BOYNE
Cyril Avery is not a real Avery — or at least, that’s what his adoptive parents tell him. And he never will be. But if he isn’t a real Avery, then who is he? Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple via the intervention of a hunchbacked Redemptorist nun, Cyril is adrift in the world, anchored only tenuously by his heartfelt friendship with the infinitely more glamourous and dangerous Julian Woodbead. At the mercy of fortune and coincidence, he will spend a lifetime coming to know himself and where he came from – and over his many years, will struggle to discover an identity, a home, a country, and much more.
A GIRL IS A HALF-FORMED THING BY EIMEAR MCBRIDE
In scathing, furious, unforgettable prose, Eimear McBride tells the story of a young girl’s devastating adolescence as she and her brother, who suffers from a brain tumor, struggle for a semblance of normalcy in the shadow of sexual abuse, denial, and chaos at home. Plunging readers inside the psyche of a girl isolated by her own dangerously confusing sexuality, pervading guilt, and unrelenting trauma, McBride’s writing carries echoes of Joyce, O’Brien, and Woolf.
SOLAR BONES BY MIKE MCORMACK
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.
1916 BY MORGAN LLYWELYN
Ned Halloran has lost both his parents–and almost his own life–to the sinking of the Titanic . Determined to keep what little he has, he returns to his homeland in Ireland and enrolls at Saint Enda’s school in Dublin. Saint Enda’s headmaster is the renowned scholar and poet, Patrick Pearse–who is soon to gain greater fame as a rebel and patriot. Ned becomes totally involved with the growing revolution…and the sacrifices it will demand.
STIR-FRY BY EMMA DONOGHUE
Seventeen and sure of nothing, Maria has left her parents’ small-town grocery for university life in Dublin. An ad in the Student Union – ‘2 women seek flatmate. No bigots’ – leads Maria to a home with warm Ruth and wickedly funny Jael, students who are older and more fascinating than she’d expected…
CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS BY SALLY ROONEY
Frances is a coolheaded and darkly observant young woman, vaguely pursuing a career in writing while studying in Dublin. Her best friend is the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi. At a local poetry performance one night, they meet a well-known photographer, and as the girls are then gradually drawn into her world, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman’s sophisticated home and handsome husband, Nick. But however amusing Frances and Nick’s flirtation seems at first, it begins to give way to a strange—and then painful—intimacy.
NON FICTION
FINDING IRELAND BY RICHARD TILLINGHAST
Tillinghast orients the reader to Ireland as it is today. Following its entry into the European Union, Ireland changed radically from an impoverished, provincial, former British colony to a country where a farmer takes his wife on skiing holidays in Switzerland and is proud of his wine cellar, to one now home to immigrants from Europe, Africa, and Asia. For many Americans―Irish Americans in particular―Ireland is a mythic and timeless land; from his unique vantage point, Tillinghast debunks a good many stereotypes that prevent our seeing Ireland for what it was, as well as what it has become.
FOR THE CAUSE OF LIBERTY: A THOUSAND YEARS OF IRELAND’S HEROES BY TERRY GOLWAY
Traces the history of Irish nationalism from the beginning of the English presence in Ireland to the present, relating the stories of men and women who played pivotal roles in Ireland’s struggle to retain its identity.
IN KILTUMPER: A YEAR IN AN IRISH GARDEN BY NIALL WILLIAMS
35 years ago, when they were in their twenties, Niall Williams and Christine Breen made the impulsive decision to leave their lives in New York City and move to Christine’s ancestral home in the town of Kiltumper in rural Ireland. In the decades that followed, the pair dedicated themselves to writing, gardening, and living a life that followed the rhythms of the earth.
THE FARMER’S SON: CALVING SEASON ON A FAMILY FARM BY JOHN CONNELL
Farming has been in John Connell’s family for generations, but he never intended to follow in his father’s footsteps. Until, one winter, after more than a decade away, he finds himself back on the farm. Connell records the hypnotic rhythm of the farming day—cleaning the barns, caring for the herd, tending to sickly lambs, helping the cows give birth. Alongside the routine events, there are the unforeseen moments when things go wrong: when a calf fails to thrive, when a sheep goes missing, when illness breaks out, when an argument between father and son erupts and things are said that cannot be unsaid.
IRISH FREEDOM: THE HISTORY OF NATIONALISM IN IRELAND BY RICHARD ENGLISH
Richard English’s brilliant new book is a compelling narrative history of Irish nationalism, in which events are not merely recounted but analyzed. Full of rich detail, drawn from years of original research and also from the extensive specialist literature on the subject, it offers explanations of why Irish nationalists have believed and acted as they have, why their ideas and strategies have changed over time, and what effect Irish nationalism has had in shaping modern Ireland.
TIME PIECES: A DUBLIN MEMOIR BY JOHN BANVILLE
Born and bred in a small town a train ride away from Dublin, Banville saw the city as a place of enchantment when he was a child, a birthday treat, the place where his beloved, eccentric aunt lived. And though, when he came of age and took up residence there, and the city became a frequent backdrop for his dissatisfactions (not playing an identifiable role in his work until the Quirke mystery series, penned as Benjamin Black), it remained in some part of his memory as fascinating as it had been to his seven-year-old self. And as he guides us around the city, delighting in its cultural, architectural, political, and social history, he interweaves the memories that are attached to particular places and moments.