Literary / English literature / Irish literature

Notes from a Coma

by Mike McCormack

Rescued from the squalor of a Romanian orphanage, and adopted by the rural community of west Mayo, J. J. O'Malley should have grown up happy. The boy has no gift for it, though, and his new life has a brutal...

This Is the Way

by Gavin Corbett

Anthony Sonaghan is hiding out in an old tenement house in Dublin: he fears he’s reignited an ancient feud between the two halves of his family. Twenty-first-century Dublin may have shopping malls and foreign...

A Week in Winter

by Maeve Binchy

Stoneybridge is a small town on the west coast of Ireland where all the families know one another. When Chicky Starr decides to take an old, decaying mansion set high on the cliffs overlooking the windswept...

The Commitments

by Roddy Doyle

This funky, rude, unpretentious first novel traces the short, funny, and furious career of a group of working-class Irish kids who form a band, The Commitments. Their mission: to bring soul to Dublin!

The Testament of Mary

by Colm Toibin

PROVOCATIVE, HAUNTING AND INDELIBLE, Colm Tóibín’s portrait of Mary presents her as a solitary older woman still seeking to understand the events that become the narrative of the New Testament and the foundation...

The South

by Colm Toibin

In 1950, Katherine Proctor leaves Ireland for Barcelona, determined to escape her family and become a painter. There she meets Miguel, an anarchist veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and begins to build a life...

The Heather Blazing

by Colm Toibin

Eamon Redmond is a judge in Ireland’s high court, a completely legal creature who is just beginning to discover how painfully unconnected he is from other human beings. With effortless fluency, Colm Tóibín...

A Pagan Place

by Edna O'Brien

A PAGAN PLACE is Edna O'Brien's true novel of Ireland. Here she returns to that uniquely wonderful, terrible, peculiar place she once called home and writes not only of a life there--of the child becoming a...

Ancient Light

by John Banville

The Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea gives us a brilliant, profoundly moving new novel about an actor in the twilight of his life and his career: a meditation on love and loss, and on the inscrutable...

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

by John Boyne

'Some things are just sitting there, minding their own business, waiting to be discovered. Like America. And other things are probably better off left alone'

Nine-year-old Bruno has a lot of things on his mind....

Long Time, No See

by Dermot Healy

The funny, moving, long-awaited masterwork from "Ireland’s finest living novelist" (Roddy Doyle)

Celebrated Irish author Dermot Healy’s first novel in more than ten years is a rich, beguiling, compassionate,...

Malarky

by Anakana Schofield

What happens when a woman loves her boy so intensely she destroys him? A striking new voice in Irish fiction.

Athena

by John Banville

From the internationally acclaimed author of The Book of Evidence and Ghosts comes a mesmerizing novel that is both a literary thriller and a love story as sumptuously perverse as Lolita. "A strange and dreamlike...

Kepler

by John Banville

Doctor Copernicus

James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction 1976

by John Banville

City of Bohane

by Kevin Barry

* Shortlisted for the 2011 Costa Book Award in the First Novel category * A blazingly original, wildly stylish, and pulpy debut novel "City of Bohane, the extraordinary first novel by the Irish writer Kevin...

Ghosts

by John Banville

In this brilliantly haunting new novel, John Banville forges an unforgettable amalgam of enchantment and menace that suggests both The Tempest and his own acclaimed The Book of Evidence. "A surreal and exquisitely...

The Book of Evidence

by John Banville

John Banville’s stunning powers of mimicry are brilliantly on display in this engrossing novel, the darkly compelling confession of an improbable murderer.

Freddie Montgomery is a highly cultured man, a husband...

Adam Gould

by Julia O'Faolain

Paris in the 1890s. Adam Gould, whose Anglo-Irish father has disowned him, works in a lunatic asylum run by the celebrated Dr Blanche, some of whose patients once starred in France’s social firmament and still,...

The Empty Family: Stories

by Colm Toibin

Colm Tóibín’s exquisitely written new stories, set in present-day Ireland, 1970s Spain and nineteenthcentury England, are about people linked by love, loneliness and desire. Tóibín is a master at portraying...