Prestige Drama by Séamas O’Reilly: Warm satire on TV melodrama about the Troubles
Author’s debut novel navigates sombre and emotionally complex terrain with impressively light touch
Digital grieving and dysfunctional justice systems: some tough and thought-provoking May YA reads
Reviews in brief: ‘Hypocrisy and self-interest’ – a critique of European complacency
Upward Bound by Woody Brown: A non-verbal autistic man’s valuable appreciation of humanity
The Left and the Lucky by Willy Vlautin: Portrait of an unusual friendship and the acts that carry them
Poem of the Week: I Lived in a World, Then I Lived in Another World
When The World Sleeps by Francesca Albanese: Effortless schooling on intricacies behind Gaza headlines
Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe by Katja Hoyer serves up history with a human heart
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POETRY
Juliano Zaffino: It is never not surreal to have inspired Florence Welch by something I wrote
By Martin Doyle
Gordon Brown: Power with Purpose – what has happened to leadership motivated by seriousness?
By Matthew O’Toole
The Fallen - The Magdalene Laundries and Ireland’s Legacy of Silence: A perversion of any basic humanity
By Catriona Crowe
Talking Classics by Mary Beard: sounds like eavesdropping on a good Saturday night in Pompeii
By Neasa MacErlean
‘My brother kicked me in the balls, but I threw a knife at his head. We were in a strange world after our parents died’
By Colm McAuliffe
Murder in Paris ’68: Enthralling account of a scandal that even now seems hard to believe
By Oliver Farry
Decoding a genius – Kafkaesque: Ten Great Writers Translate the Twentieth Century
By Declan O’Driscoll
The Book That Taught the World to Orgasm and then Disappeared: Shere Hite and the Hite Report
By Rosita Sweetman
Ruth McKee: ‘Pitching a novel about a suicidal middle-aged woman getting drunk on her birthday wasn’t easy’
By Martin Doyle
The Bleeding Horse and Other Ghost Stories by Brian J Showers: Meet Dublin’s restless dead
By Henrietta McKervey
Permanence by Sophie Mackintosh: Her best work yet asks how much love’s actually worth
By Emily Goulding
The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy: An exaltingly intelligent novel that defies expectation
By Mei Chin
The Secrets of Painting by Lachlan Goudie: An infectious enthusiasm that sometimes borders on cringe
By Aengus Woods
The first film I saw at a cinema was Christopher Reeve’s Superman. It upended my childlike mind
By Ed Power
