It's official—Irish literature is having a moment in 2024. While the bombshell debut of Sally Rooney may have ignited the flame in 2017, it's clear we've entered a Golden Age of contemporary Irish writing with Irish authors racking up both commercial and critical success. So if you love the works of Sally Rooney or stories about womanhood, sexual awakenings, and awkwardness—you’ve come to the right place. Ireland and its people possess a rich literary history and a reputation for garrulousness, but for every hilarious and absurd tale, there’s often a somber darkness skirting the edges. Irish novelist and playwright, Edna O’Brien put it plainly, “When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.” I can think of no better group to showcase this Irish tradition of determination, mournfulness, and wit than the wealth of contemporary Irish women writers mentioned below. For your March book club reading recommendations, here’s a fresh selection of Irish authors you should be reading right now!
The Dames
We’ll start with the dames, Anna Burns, Edna O’Brien and Anne Enright, who have given the world decades of stunning memoir and fiction spanning themes of womanhood, sex, power, and imagination. Begin your education with O’Brien’s 1960 debut, The Country Girls, a book that was banned, burned, and denounced for breaking the silence of sexual and societal issues of post-war Ireland, and end with Enright’s 2023 novel, The Wren, the Wren, currently longlisted for the 2024 Women's Prize for Fiction. The Wren, the Wren brings to life three generations of McDaragh women who must contend with inheritances—of poetic wonder and of abandonment by a man who is lauded in public and carelessly selfish at home. Their other, stronger inheritance is a sustaining love that is "more than a strand of DNA, but a rope thrown from the past, a fat twisted rope, full of blood." In sharp prose studded with crystalline poetry, Anne Enright masterfully braids a family story of longing, betrayal, and hope.
Anna Burns was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and currently resides in London. Her novel Milkman, won the 2018 Man Booker Prize, the 2019 Orwell Prize for political fiction, and the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award. Milkman is fashioned as a stream-of-consciousness psychological thriller set in the troubles-era North brimming with dark humor, angst, and absurdity.
The New School
Helen Cullen
Helen Cullen is an Irish writer and broadcaster. Her second novel The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually in Ireland and the UK (The Dazzling Truth in the USA and Canada) is a “compassionate portrayal of love, support, and grief… recognizable to anyone who has suffered from depression and mental illness.”
Tana French
Award-winning Irish novelist and actress, Tana French has been dubbed the 'First Lady of Irish Crime' since her stunning 2007 debut In the Woods, a psychological mystery that won the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, and Barry awards for best first novel. Her newest release, The Hunter, hit shelves in March 2024 and was named a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by the Washington Post, TIME Magazine, BBC, and TODAY. French's The Hunter is a nuanced, atmospheric tale that explores what we'll do for our loved ones, what we'll do for revenge, and what we sacrifice when the two collide.
Claire Keegan
Keegan's award-winning short stories and novellas have met with international acclaim and have been translated into thirty languages. Her novella, Small Things Like These, was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and is now being adapted as a film, starring Cillian Murphy. Her most recent collection, So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men, probes at the bewildering and often sinister power dynamics between men and women.
Louise Kennedy
Before becoming a professional writer, Louise Kennedy worked as a chef for nearly thirty years. Her 2022 debut novel Trespasses, shortlisted for the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction, taps into her volatile childhood amid the Troubles and "captures the texture of life in Northern Ireland — details, objects and images that carry incredible emotional weight." (Tobias Grey) She's also written for The Guardian, Irish Times, and in 2023 published a collection of "brilliant, dark stories of women's lives" titled, The End of the World is a Cul de Sac.
Claire Kilroy
This book recommendation is for all the super-fans who have devoured every Rooney title, but still have a nagging itch that you just can’t scratch. Kilroy’s 2009 novel, All Names Have Been Changed is set in the grittier and sexier 1980s version of Trinity College and centers on five creative writing students and the turbulent relationships they have with their famous tutor. Unlike Rooney’s characters’ ruminations, this story is told from a male perspective. Claire Kilroy's acclaimed new novel, Soldier Sailor, has been longlisted for the 2024 Women's Prize for Fiction, in which she creates an unforgettable heroine, whose fierce love for her young son clashes with the seismic change to her own identity.
Eimear McBride
At the age of twenty-seven, Eimear McBride wrote A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing and spent the next nine years trying to have it published. McBride’s story about a nameless woman who is driven to despair by intimate family trauma and learns to use her sexuality as both a weapon and shield won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2014. Her award-winning follow-up novel, The Lesser Bohemians charting the year-long course of an all-consuming love affair between a young Irish woman and an older English man was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize.
Maggie O'Farrell
Best-selling novelist and memoirist Maggie O'Farrell of Northern Ireland has been in demand since her Sunday Times No.1 bestseller, Hamnet won the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Awards and Women's Prize for Fiction. Her breathtaking follow-up novel, The Marriage Portrait is a dazzling evocation of the Italian Renaissance in all its beauty and brutality and was again shortlisted for the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction. In addition to her novels and memoir, I Am, I Am, O'Farrell has authored two children's books.
Cathy Sweeney
Cathy Sweeney is a short fiction writer and teacher from Dublin. Her critically-acclaimed work has appeared in The Stinging Fly, The Dublin Review, and Banshee. In 2020 she published Modern Times, an inventive collection of 21 surreal stories full of effortless humor and poignancy running the gamut from a woman ordering a sex doll for her husband’s birthday to a married couple who take turns sitting in an electric chair.
The Young Ones
Sara Baume
Named by Granta Magazine as one of Britain's "Best Young Novelists" in 2023, Irish novelist and graphic artist, Sara Baume was the winner of the 2015 Irish Book Newcomer of the Year award for her debut novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither, a tale of a lonely old man and his misfit dog. Death and loneliness are recurring themes for Baume, as well as beauty and redemption that can be found in unexpected places. Her acclaimed 2022 novel, Seven Steeples, was an Irish Times Best Book of the Year and one of Wall Street Journal's 10 Best Books of 2022. Seven Steeples is a beautiful and profound meditation on the nature of love and the resilience of nature. Through her characters, Baume explores what it means to escape the traditional paths laid before us—and what it means to evolve in devotion to another person and to the landscape.
Nicole Flattery
Nicole Flattery's work has been published in The Stinging Fly, the White Review, Irish Times, and the 2019 Faber Anthology of New Irish Writing, to name a few. Her 2020 debut collection of short stories, Show Them a Good Time, explores modern life through the experiences of “young women in self-imposed exile, searching for meaning that they might never find.” Dig into the collection for an honest, funny, look into the restrictiveness of women’s lives and follow with her 2023 novel, Nothing Special, a wildly original coming-of-age story about a teenage girl working at Andy Warhol’s Factory in 1960s New York, which was named a "Best Book of the Year" by The New Yorker and Time.
Niamh Mulvey
We're thrilled to tout up-and-coming talent Niamh Mulvey from Kilkenny, Ireland. Her short fiction has been published in The Stinging Fly, Banshee, and Southword and was shortlisted for the Seán O’Faoláin Prize for Short Fiction 2020. Her debut collection, Hearts and Bones explores what love does to us, and how we survive it. “Set between Ireland and London in the first two decades of this millennium, the stories look at the changes that have torn through these times and ask who we are now that we’ve brought the old gods down.” In 2024, Mulvey hits the shelves yet again with her first full-length novel, The Amendments, which delves into the lives of three generations of women—from the tensions of women's rights during the 1980s to the early 2000s, as Ireland was unpicking itself from its faith and embracing the hedonism of the Celtic Tiger. The Amendments is an extraordinary novel about love and freedom, belonging and rebellion – and about how our past is a vital presence that sits alongside us. The Bookclubs team was lucky enough to interview Mulvey for our Author Chats Book Club and we're slated for another interview in September 2024 to coincide with the U.S. release of The Amendments.
Megan Nolan
Nolan's 2022 break-out debut, Acts of Desperation, was dubbed "a blistering anti-romance novel" about the perils of toxic love addiction. In February 2024, she released her sophomore novel, Ordinary Human Failings, which was longlisted for the 2024 Women's Prize for Fiction. Ordinary Human Failings charts the tragic and rippling fallout after a child is found dead on a London estate. The tight-knit neighborhood suspects a family of Irish immigrants of being behind it and the media is all too willing to capitalize on the suspicion. The power of the novel relies less on suspense and more on, it’s “visceral, knowing exploration of human misery and the ways we fail ourselves.” —Molly Odinitz
Doireann Ní Ghríofa
Doireann Ní Ghríofa is a poet and essayist whose work explores birth, death, desire, and domesticity. Ní Ghríofa’s genre-bending prose work A Ghost in the Throat, was voted 2021 Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards and has been described as a “powerful” (New York Times), “captivatingly original” (The Guardian), and has rightly found praise through countless awards and admirers. In her most recent release, To Star the Dark (2021), Ní Ghríofa constructs a mysterious world for her readers from the matter of ordinary life. The poems of this collection impress upon us that magic and depth can be found in the minutiae of the everyday.
Louise O’Neill
YA author Louise O'Neill’s debut novel, Only Ever Yours, was released in 2014 and won the Newcomer of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. Her second novel, Asking For It, earned widespread critical acclaim spending 52 consecutive weeks in the Irish top 10 bestseller list, and has been optioned for the big screen. Both novels confront uncomfortable truths about Western culture, sexual assault, and consent. In 2018, she penned The Surface Breaks, a feminist reimagining of The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen, and most recently O'Neill has forayed into adult fiction with her 2022 thriller, Idol, a gripping and unsettling interrogation of the world of online influencers, asking how well we can ever really know those whose carefully curated profiles we follow online. Idol asks us to consider how two memories of the same event can differ, and how effortlessly we choose which stories to believe.
Sally Rooney
We would be remiss if we failed to mention global phenom Sally Rooney's upcoming 2024 release, Intermezzo, an exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family. Rooney is famed for exploring complicated romantic entanglement, but unlike her previous novels, Intermezzo follows two brothers, on seemingly different life paths, as they wrestle with their relationship with each other, and the people they love during the wake of familial despair.
Related Content:
Browse our list of public book clubs focusing on books by diverse authors meeting in-person and/or online:
- In-person book clubs located in the United Kingdom and Ireland
- Book clubs reading books by BIPOC or other underrepresented authors
- Book clubs reading books by women
Diversify your bookshelf with our Book Club Reading Lists below:
- LGBTQ+ Books to Read During Pride Month
- Books by Black Authors to Read With Your Book Club
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- Books for AAPI Heritage Month
- Books About Mental Health Everyone Should Read
- Must Read Books for Women's History Month
- Indigenous Authors You Should Be Reading
- The Best Books for Latinx and Hispanic Heritage Month
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