Declan Burke
The sequel to his excellent White Riot, Joe Thomas’s Red Menace is a 1980s-set thriller of police corruption in the UK. The best spy novel of the year so far is Oliver Harris’s The Shame Archive, which deals with the consequences of MI5′s archives being ransacked by bad actors. Set in Irish academia, Jo Spain’s The Trial is yet another suspense masterclass from the queen of the Irish thriller. And I’m really looking forward to The Cracked Mirror from the always reliable Chris Brookmyre, a blackly comic Agatha Christie homage which is published next month.
Declan Burke’s latest novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press)
Jan Carson
I adored Orla Mackey’s novel Mouthing. Set in a rural, Irish village, it casts a fond, but often brutal, eye over the locals’ comings, goings and couplings. The world Mackey pitches her readers into is hilarious, heartbreaking and oh-so-familiar to anyone who grew up in a small community. No character is straightforward here and each voices their story in a unique and compelling way. Mouthing is a startling debut. My TBR pile is currently threatening to take me out, but I’ll be prioritising Belfast-based novelist Phil Harrison’s second book, Silverback, which explores masculinity, fragility and violence in contemporary Belfast. I’ve heard great things.
Jan Carson’s latest book is Quickly, While They Still Have Horses
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Edel Coffey
Long Island, Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn sequel, is the most enjoyable novel I’ve read this year, a delicately devastating study of paths not taken. I loved Ferdia Lennon’s brilliant debut Glorious Exploits. Set in Sicily in 412 BC and told in a Dublin vernacular, it is both wildly entertaining and grimly unsettling with its modern-day resonances of war. I also loved James, Percival Everett’s retelling of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn character Jim. It’s timely and witty and funny, but also linguistically clever, philosophically curious and brilliantly subversive about literature and history. One I’ve been hoarding for my holidays is Francesca Segal’s Welcome to Glorious Tuga, a twinkly novel about a woman who is searching for answers on a remote island full of charming locals, exotic wildlife and, of course, a handsome doctor.
Edel Coffey’s latest book is In Her Place
Helen Cullen
The standout novel for me so far this year is Two Hours by Alba Arikha. In my review for The Irish Times I described it as a literary masterpiece of grace and weight and I have not stopped recommending it since. In poetry, the new collection by Elaine Feeney, All the Good Things You Deserve, delivered an intimate, powerful examination of the transformative power of art to heal. I also loved reuniting with Eilis in Colm Tóibín’s Long Island, which so beautifully resurrected the characters from Brooklyn. Next I am looking forward to the return of another literary friend, Lucy Barton, when Elizabeth Strout publishes Tell Me Everything in August.
Helen Cullen is the author of The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually
Niamh Donnelly
I seem to have spent most of my year reading and loving books about characters named Nell (I’m looking at you Niamh Mulvey, Sinéad Gleeson, Anne Enright). Mulvey’s cool command over large subject matter in The Amendments was a joy to encounter. Gleeson’s originality and lyricism in Hagstone had me entranced. Enright’s The Wren, The Wren came out last year but still hasn’t left me. I gave an effusive review of Maggie Armstrong’s debut short story collection Old Romantics in these pages and I stand by it – her writing is such a thrill. A word also for Sarah Crossan’s Hey, Zoey, and Swiss author Ariane Koch’s absurdist debut, Overstaying, translated by Damion Searls. I plan to spend my summer with the late, great Alice Munro but, in between, I’ll be devouring Hard Copy by Fien Veldman, translated from Dutch by Hester Velmans. Veldman and I crossed paths once, years ago, and I’ve had my eye out for this brilliant writer ever since. Her debut novel, about a woman who becomes obsessed with her office printer, looks offbeat, absurd and made for a reader like me.
Niamh Donnelly is a critic
Martin Doyle
Ferdia Lennon’s Glorious Exploits will be hard to beat this year as a feat of imagination. Set in Sicily in ancient times, but with delightful Dublinese dialogue, the novel concerns two friends – one grieving, the other smitten – who plot to stage their favourite classical dramas with Athenian prisoners-of-war in the quarry where they are held captive. A tragicomedy that will stand the test of time. Caoilinn Hughes’s The Wild Laughter won the Encore Award for best second novel. If there were one for best third novel, I’d put money on her The Alternatives, a study of four brilliant Irish sisters which brims with intelligence and ideas but also sparkling wit and wordplay. Niamh Mulvey’s The Amendments is a superb, warm, intergenerational evocation of young Irish women coming of age in a cold social climate set against the backdrop of the two abortion referendums. Orla Mackey’s Mouthing is a funny, loving but unsentimentally sharp-eyed evocation of Irish rural life, building up a compelling picture of a community over decades and through a variety of sometimes contradictory perspectives.
Martin Doyle is Books Editor of The Irish Times and author of Dirty Linen: The Troubles in My Home Place
Anne Enright
You can read Clair Wills’s Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets as a kind of family memoir about the bad old days – it certainly makes for propulsive and sad reading – but that would be to miss the breadth and precision her training as a social historian brings to the story, which is so tactfully told. This is a really necessary book about Ireland. Another non-fiction work that deals with the big historical questions is Richard Flanagan’s Question 7, a constantly interesting, roving philosophical inquiry, almost impossible to describe; it is written with a terrific, possibly very Australian, lack of pretension. Also from Oz, one of my writing heroines, Helen Garner, has been reissued this side of the world in paperback. Fiction, non-fiction equally superb. Oh happy day.
Anne Enright’s latest novel is The Wren, The Wren
Sarah Gilmartin
I’m all about the short story for summer. Maggie Armstrong’s debut collection Old Romantics is a riot – funny, beautifully written and, featuring the same narrator throughout, it has the heft of a novel. Lucy Caldwell’s Openings is the third collection from the Belfast writer who has really made the form her own. I reviewed Mary Costello’s Barcelona earlier this year and it’s been a joy to go back to each of the stories and read them for pleasure. The Choc-Ice Woman in particular is a modern masterpiece.
Sarah Gilmartin’s novel Service (One) is out now in paperback
Rónán Hession
Japanese fiction has been strong this year with Cannibals by Shinya Tanaka, translated by Kalau Almony; Asa: The Girl Who Turned Into a Pair of Chopsticks by Natsuko Imamura, translated by Lucy North; and The Bridegroom was a Dog by Yoko Tawada, translated by Margaret Mitsutani. The Physics of Sorrow by Bulgarian master Georgi Gospodinov, translated by Angela Rodel, also impressed. I loved Heart, Be at Peace, the forthcoming novel by Donal Ryan, and Aidan Mathews’ superb poetry collection, Pure Filth. The novels I’m looking forward to reading over the summer include Spent Light by Lara Pawson and Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel. On audiobook during long drives, I’ll be hooked up to Big Beacon by Alan Partridge.
Rónán Hession’s latest novel is Ghost Mountain
Christopher Kissane
Colin Barrett’s Wild Houses draws his short story skills out to novel length. Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over travels westwards too, in a horrifying but brilliant zombie journey through death and violence. The repetition and concision of Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail makes it heartbreaking reading against the backdrop of the horrors in Gaza. Tyler Anbinder’s Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York about the one million Irish who arrived in New York during the Famine is vitally timed for current debates about migration. I’m excited for the English translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium, an exploration of horror and ideas, and for Rachel Cusk’s next experiment with disrupting the novel, Parade. Diarmaid Ferriter’s The Revelation of Ireland 1995-2020 is likely to be essential pre-election reading.
Christopher Kissane is a historian, writer and reviewer
Mia Levitin
Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries, Rachel Cockerell’s Melting Point and Rebecca Watson’s I Will Crash all wowed me by innovating form. I also loved Eliza Barry Callahan’s debut The Hearing Test, about a film composer with sudden deafness, Percival Everett’s novel James and Lucy Caldwell’s short-story collection Openings. This summer, I’m looking forward to diving into Mammoth by Eva Baltasar (tr. Julia Sanches); The Memo by Lauren Mechling and Rachel Dodes; and Sarah Manguso’s Liars, which Nick Hornby describes as “a howl of rage”. And, not gonna lie, I’ll be toting around my Sally Rooney proof as an envy-inducing accessory.
Mia Levitin is a critic and author of The Future of Seduction
Ruth McKee
To misquote Murakami, I’m reading what everyone else is reading, and thinking what everyone else is thinking when it comes to Ghost Mountain by Rónán Hession: it’s philosophical, profound and funny, and my book of the year so far. I’m drawn to books by wise, experienced people at the moment; I fell into the eloquent grip of A Good Enough Mother by Catherine Dunne, a gifted storyteller, and I’m absorbing the poems in We Go On by Kerry Hardie, which is by my side on the desk. Over the summer I’m rereading Alice Munro, starting with that belter, Runaway.
Ruth McKee is editor of Books Ireland magazine
Joseph O’Connor
I’m a big fan of Niamh Mulvey’s writing and I loved her debut novel, The Amendments. Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time is a really remarkable and powerful book, a hugely thought-provoking page-turner that is also moving and sometimes funny. My nonfiction book of the year so far is The Garden Against Time by the brilliant Olivia Laing. It’s so spellbinding that I’m reading it slowly and wish I could make it last the whole summer. I’ve just started Colm Tóibín’s wonderful Long Island and it’s bringing me evocative memories of long July evenings far from home.
Joseph O’Connor’s latest novel is My Father’s House. Its sequel, The Ghosts of Rome, will be published in January
Fintan O’Toole
Ferdia Lennon’s Glorious Exploits is a dazzling historical novel and an extraordinary debut. It is set in and around Syracuse in the fifth century BCE, in the aftermath of the catastrophic failure of an invasion by Athens. Two unemployed potters, one of whom is obsessed with the theatre, get some of the starving Athenian prisoners to stage plays by Euripides. Part of Lennon’s brilliance lies in the decision to have the story narrated in contemporary Dublinese, a risky venture that pays great dividends of immediacy, humour and poignancy. Colm Tóibín’s Long Island is a masterpiece of emotional intelligence. He picks up the story of Eilis Lacey 20 years on from the end of Brooklyn and creates, if anything, an even richer, more minutely plotted pathway through the human heart and mind. It’s a marvel that language so restrained can generate such powerful currents of sympathy. Anyone looking for total immersion in actual history could scarcely do better than Christoper Clark’s magnificent Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849, a sweeping, breathtaking account of the series of revolutions and counter-revolutions that did so much to shape modern Europe. I’m really looking forward to Sally Rooney’s soon-to-be-published fourth novel, Intermezzo. It will fascinating to see where she goes next.
Fintan O’Toole’s latest book is Shakespeare Is Hard, but So Is Life
John Self
Two novels that manage the difficult trick of being political and personal as well as telling a great story are Hisham Matar’s My Friends – about a man whose life is defined by witnessing the Libyan embassy siege in London in 1984 – and Sunjeev Sahota’s The Spoiled Heart, which packs such a huge amount in – trade unions, family strife, prejudice, love, tricks and twists – that I kept scouring the pages for hidden trapdoors. I also loved Karen Jennings’s Crooked Seeds, which has a grouchy, selfish central character so brilliantly drawn you can’t look away from her, and Alba Arikha’s Two Hours, an intense story of young love and its consequences.
John Self is a critic
Catherine Taylor
In fiction this year I’ve loved Openings, Lucy Caldwell’s latest book of short stories, which forms a loose trilogy with her previous collections. Caldwell is such a precise and skilled writer, praised as the “inheritor” of Elizabeth Bowen. Bowen herself inspires one of the best pieces here: Daylight Raids, about a passionate love affair set during London’s Blitz. Jo Baker’s The Midnight News is also an homage to Bowen, and explicitly her 1948 masterpiece The Heat of the Day. It’s a beautifully written thriller of wartime London, proving that Baker can take on any historical period and make it her own. Politics, race, class and identity are thorny subjects for any author but twice Booker-nominated Sunjeev Sahota’s The Spoiled Heart, set during a fierce battle for union leadership in South Yorkshire, has everything: a mystery, tragedy, stark humour, brilliantly drawn characters and a double whammy of a finale.
The year in non-fiction has so far brought some splendid memoirs, including Catherine Coldstream’s lyrical and hard-hitting Cloistered: My Years as a Nun, Leslie Jamison’s visceral Splinters and Marianne Brooker’s extraordinary Intervals, a stunning exploration of how we give and receive care, based on the experience of her mother’s multiple sclerosis.
In translation, Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos, translated by Michael Hofmann, featuring a fractured relationship set in East Berlin just before the end of the Cold War, was a deserved winner of the International Booker Prize. Also on the shortlist was Argentina’s Selva Almada, with the brief and brutal Not a River, translated by Annie McDermott. From Chile, Alia Trabucco Zerán’s Clean, translated by Sophie Hughes, based on a notorious case of child murder, is a breathtaking examination of class and domestic violence, set against the backdrop of Chile’s changing political landscape.
This summer I’m looking forward to immersing myself in books as varied as Monsters: What Do We Do with Great Art by Bad People?, cultural critic Clare Dederer’s provocative essays in the wake of #MeToo; James, Percival Everett’s bold and wild reinterpretation of Huckleberry Finn, and, in honour of her centenary in August, the novels, stories and famed autobiography of one of New Zealand’s greatest writers – Janet Frame.
Catherine Taylor is a critic and author of The Stirrings: Coming of Age in Northern Time
