The Boyhood of Cain by Michael Amherst: An interesting and unusual book told from a 12-year-old’s perspective
The author approaches the subject with skill and sensitivity
By John Boyne
Beartooth by Callan Wink: Spare and remarkable
Looking at Women Looking at War by Victoria Amelina: Valuable, vivid, frustrating
Wild West Village by Lola Kirke: Frank, often darkly comedic accounts of celebrity-adjacent family antics
The Secret Painter by Joe Tucker: A complex, multilayered portrait of an ostensibly ordinary working-class life
Poem of the Week: Something
Kevin Barry and Ferdia Lennon on Walter Scott Prize longlist
The Wardrobe Department by Elaine Garvey: Evocation of youthful self-discovery is well wrought and truthful
Book Club
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Frogs for Watchdogs by Seán Farrell: Tremendous debut set in 1980s Co Meath floats free of constraints
By Alex Clark
A breakthrough era for women’s writing, from Edna O’Brien’s risks to JK Rowling’s Harry Potter debut
By Paula McGrath
Author Elaine Garvey: When I was a teenager, you couldn’t be ‘easy’ but you couldn’t be ‘frigid’ either. Whatever you did was wrong
By Edel Coffey
For girls of my generation, especially working class girls, lack of confidence was touted as a positive
By Sharon Guard
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This and The World after Gaza: holding the West to account
By Oliver Farry
The Vanishing Point by Paul Theroux: If this is his last round–up, his final words are good and true ones
By Pat Carty
The Knowing by Madeleine Ryan: A fun, fast-paced, unfiltered journey through the mind of a twenty-something
By Julia Kelly
Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis by Robert D Kaplan - An alarmingly influential book
By Ian Hughes
Land Power: How ownership of the ground beneath our feet can mould our destiny and even embed racial and gendered inequalities
By Brian Casey
The Boy from the Sea by Garrett Carr: Wry, observant, various and thoughtful, this novel does something only art can
By Nicholas Allen
New poetry: The Keelie Hawk, poems written entirely in Scots, will delight and puzzle
By Vona Groarke
Eimear McBride: ‘When my brother died, it was not only losing him but losing all the illusions that you were going to be safe’
By Martin Doyle
The Politics of Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland: A Reader. Harrowing histories that cohere under the north star of liberation
By Adrienne Murphy
