Reading list: Modern Irish novels

Tender by Belinda McKeon

In ’90s Dublin, Catherine and James, two students with starkly different personalities meet at the city's reputed Trinity College and become fast friends. But as their paths veer in different directions, steered by Ireland’s own progress at the time, their relationship sprouts new complexities. Swiftly winning critical acclaim with her second novel, McKeon builds vivid, forceful insights on the squally seasons of friendship.   

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A History Of Loneliness by John Boyne

The award-winning author of The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas writes about his native country for the first time, digging into the messy history of the Catholic Church. After Odran Yates' father drowns himself and his four-year-old son in the sea, the young boy finds a new home in Dublin's Clonliffe Seminary. But years later, when his closest friends face molestation charges, old demons come visiting again. 

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 The Mark And The Void by Paul Murray

In this sharp satire on global banking, Claude Martingale, a French analyst looking for hassle-free existence in Dublin is shadowed by a fading novelist looking for a sellable plot. His idea? A gripping tale of a banker who robs a bank. Set against Ireland’s economic slump, Murray enters mundane territory, and makes it ridiculously entertaining.    

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Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín 

The fast-selling Irish writer was awarded this year’s Hawthornden Prize for his moving portrait of a forty-something widow consumed by sorrow after her husband’s loss. Bound to grief in Ireland’s Wexford town (Tóibín's own home for several years), she finds an unusual route to recovery: singing lessons.

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The Green Road by Anne Enright 

The Booker-Prize-Winner drops you smack in the middle of familial conflict (a well-frequented space in her writing) with the decades-spanning story of Rosaleen and her four children. A rare Christmas reunion, planned after Rosaleen decides to sell the family home in a sleepy West-Ireland town binds the narrative that jumps back and forth into between what once was and what could be.

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