Irish fiction
Sequels by Donal Ryan, Colm Tóibín and Roddy Doyle were some of 2024′s most successful novels and next year might be no different.
The City Changes Its Face (Faber, February) by Eimear McBride is not being marketed as a sequel but it does continue the story of Stephen and Eily, the tempestuous lovers from 2017′s superb The Lesser Bohemians, as they try to settle down in London after the intoxication of first falling in love wears off.
The Ghosts of Rome (Harvill Secker, January) by Joseph O’Connor continues the story of the second World War escape route in Rome for enemies of fascism after 2023′s My Father’s House, the focus shifting from Msgr Hugh O’Flaherty to Contessa Giovanna Landini.
Air (Doubleday, May) by John Boyne, about a man trying to move forward from the trauma of his youth to become a better father to his son, completes his series of novellas. The Elements, comprising Water, Earth, Fire, and Air, will be published in one volume in September.
The Naming of the Birds (W & N, February) by Paraic O’Donnell sees the return of the deliciously irascible Inspector Henry Cutter, star turn of The House on Vesper Sands (2018). London, 1894: Cutter is in an unconvivial temper. Then the murders begin.
With echoes of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Twist (Bloomsbury, March) by Colum McCann, his follow-up to the acclaimed Apeirogon, follows two Irishmen off Africa as vital underwater cables are repaired, and sabotaged.
The Paris Express (Picador, March) by Emma Donoghue (Room, The Wonder) is set in 1895. Paris is as chaotic as it is glamorous. Industry and invention create huge wealth and terrible poverty. One morning, an anarchist boards the ill-fated Granville-to-Paris express train, determined to make her mark on history.
In Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way (Harvill Secker, May) by Elaine Feeney, Booker-longlisted for her last novel, How to Build a Boat, Claire splits from Tom in London to go home to Ireland to care for her dying father. Two years later, Tom is working in Ireland. But a dark past complicates matters.
The Best of Everything (Tinder, April) by Kit de Waal, bestselling author of My Name is Leon, is a novel about the love that can steal into our lives – in spite of the best-laid plans.
Few and Far Between (Doubleday, July) by Jan Carson (The Raptures) imagines an alterative history where Terence O’Neill’s proposal to drain Lough Neagh in the North is carried out, creating a haven from the Troubles for a community of exiles.
Venetian Vespers by John Banville (Faber, September) is an eerily atmospheric stand-alone novel from the bestselling Booker Prize-winning author; an unhappily married couple head for Venice over new year as the 20th century beckons.
The Bureau (riverrun, March) by Eoin McNamee (Resurrection Man; the Blue trilogy) revolves around a dodgy bureau de change on the Border and the volatile relationship of Lorraine and Paddy.
The Wildelings (Bloomsbury, May) by Lisa Harding is a story of obsession, control and guilt, set in 1990s Dublin, pitched as perfect for fans of dark academia and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.
Ghost Wedding (Oneworld, May) by David Park follows two troubled men, separated by nearly a century, bound by the ghosts that haunt an imposing Irish manor.
May All Your Skies Be Blue (Faber, February) by Fíona Scarlett, a follow-up to the deeply moving Boys Don’t Cry, is set in Dublin in the summer of 1991 and tracks the blooming friendship of schoolfriends Shauna and Dean.
The Benefactors (Sceptre, June) is the debut novel by one of Ireland’s finest short-story writers, Wendy Erskine (Dance Move, Sweet Home). Three women from very different families are brought together when their sons are accused of assaulting a young woman whose social standing they see as far below their own.
Nesting (Scribner, January) by Roisin O’Donnell, her debut novel after an admired story collection, Wild Quiet, follows a woman who with two young daughters flees her unsafe home and tries to rebuild an independent life.
A novel of two halves, a decade apart, The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth (Tuskar Rock, January) by Adrian Duncan is an excavation of human desires, inhibitions, and the patterns of habit to which we unwittingly fall prey.
Beyond Dorothy (Harper, June) by Hazel Gaynor takes the story of Dorothy’s Aunt Em from The Wizard of Oz and reimagines prairie homestead life from a young woman’s point of view.
Solo by Grainne O’Brien (Little Island, April) is a novel in verse about teenage love and friendships.
Samuel Beckett’s trilogy of novels - Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable (Faber, March) - is being republished, with new introductions by Eimear McBride among others. A Walter Macken Trilogy (Pan, April), with new introductions by the author’s son, Ultan Macken, is being reissued: Seek the Fair Land (1959); The Silent People (1962); and The Scorching Wind (1964). To mark the centenary of her birth, A Time Outworn (451 Editions, February) by Val Mulkerns, her 1951 debut novel is being reissued withv a foreword by Carlo Gébler and a preface by her daughter, Maev Kennedy.
Best Friends (Muswell Press, May) by Andrew Meehan, with echoes of You Are Here and Olive Kitteridge, ponders the question, is it ever too late to find love?
In The Stolen Child (Headline, February), Carmel Harrington explores every parent’s worst nightmare, in a tense and emotional novel about an abducted child, a desperate mother and a trail of lies.
Show Me Where it Hurts by Claire Gleeson (Sceptre, April), an arresting debut novel following the story of a woman forced to rebuild her life after in one explosive moment, her husband destroys everything they’ve built together.
The Good Mistress by Anne Tiernan (Hachette Books Ireland, April). As three women’s lives collide, they must reconcile the realities of love, betrayal and the limits of forgiveness – because what does it truly mean to be “good”, anyway?
In The Children of Eve (Hodder & Stoughton, May) by John Connolly, the ghosts of Charlie Parker’s past watch over him as danger moves ever closer, in this spellbinding new novel.
In Writers Anonymous (New Island, April) by Booker longlisted William Wall, a lonely boy is murdered in the graveyard of his quiet fishing town in 1980. Forty years later, a writer finds himself forced to confront the one story he’s refused all his life to tell.
Paradise House (Somerville Press, May) by Paul Perry imagines James Joyce’s cinema, Ireland’s first, as a success and revisions him as Gatsby in an Irish retelling of Fitzgerald’s classic while Ireland teeters on the threshold of revolution.
[ F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is the great Irish diaspora novelOpens in new window ]
Stories of Ireland (Penguin, March) is an anthology of stories by the late Brian Friel, a writer best known for his plays.
Twenty-Twenty Vision (Lilliput, March) by Mary Morrissy is a collection of 20 interlinked short stories about hindsight and late middle-age regret subtly framed within the first year of the pandemic
A ghostwriter is locked in an interview room with a man who might be a murderer in Burn After Reading (Penguin, March), the new mystery thriller by Catherine Ryan Howard (56 Days, The Trap).
It Should Have Been You (Penguin, May) is the latest thriller by Andrea Mara, whose thriller All Her Fault is being adapted for the screen by Sarah Snook.
The Glass House (Atlantic, February) by Rachel Donohue (The Temple House Vanishing) is a tale of two sisters haunted by the absence of a long-dead father and the terrible secrets he kept.
In Our Song (Hachette, June) by Anna Carey, Laura was left behind when Tadhg went on to fame and fortune but now he wants to finish an old song they wrote together.
I Hear You (Salt, March) by Paul McVeigh (The Good Son), is a collection of short stories originally commissioned by BBC Radio 4.
Eden’s Shore (John Murray, April) by Oisin Fagan follows Angel Kelly, who sets sail from Liverpool in the 1790s to create a utopian commune in Brazil but a mutiny strands him in a Spanish colony instead.
Monaghan (Unbound, June) by Timothy O’Grady moves from west Belfast and Co Monaghan to San Francisco, an epic portrait of art and war, authenticity and selling out.
In The Movie Of Her Life (Doire Press, April) is YA author and critic Claire Hennessy’s adult fiction debut – edgy, voice-driven short stories that grapple with unspeakable longings and quiet devastation.
The Mysterious Bakery on Rue de Paris (One More Chapter, March), about an Irish woman making a new life as a baker in France, is Evie Woods’s escapist follow-up to her phenomenally successful The Lost Bookshop.
2025 is going to be a strong year for Irish debuts.
The Boy from the Sea (Picador, February) by Garrett Carr, author of The Rule of the Land: Walking Ireland’s Border, is outstanding. A baby is found abandoned on the beach in a Donegal fishing port. Named Brendan by Ambrose Bonnar, the fisherman who adopts him, the baby captivates the town but causes family conflict. Carr is from Killybegs, as is Alan Murrin, Newcomer of the Year at the 2024 Irish book awards for The Coast Road. It could be two in a row for the town.
I Want to Go Home But I’m Already There (Fig Tree, March) by Róisín Lanigan is a brilliant, creepy account of the nightmare that haunts a generation: renting in London.
In To Avenge a Dead Glacier (Lilliput, April), Shane Tivenan, winner of the RTÉ Francis McManus Short Story Prize, explores the lives of Irish outsiders in his debut collection.
Confessions (Viking, January) by Catherine Airey follows a young woman orphaned after 9/11 as she goes to live with an aunt in her parents’ native Ireland to rebuild a life.
In Frogs for Watchdogs (New Island, February) by Sean Farrell, young family finds shelter in an isolated house in the Irish countryside. Their father is missing, Mum is a healer and B a formidable big sister. In his strange new territory, a wild little boy gives voice to his experience.
The Wardrobe Department (Canongate, February) by Elaine Garvey is a deeply moving account of Mairéad’s attempts to establish herself backstage in a London theatre but her life back home in Ireland is looming in the wings.
Every One Still Here (Stinging Fly, March) by Liadain Ní Chuinn is a debut collection from a prestigious press by a Northern author with an impressive track record in literary magazines.
In Water in the Desert Fire in the Night (Tramp Press, May) by Gethan Dick an underachieving millennial, a retired midwife, and a charismatic Dubliner cycle from London to the Alps after the end of the world.
We Used to Dance Here (Granta, August) by Dave Tynan explores a Dublin in flux, addressing toxic masculinity, frustrated ambitions and life on the fringes.
Fair Play (Picador, April) by Louise Hegarty is a genre-bending locked-room mystery set in a rural Irish Airbnb.
The Language of Remembering (Époque, February) by Patrick Holloway tells of a man who returns with his family from Brazil to Ireland to care for his mother, who has Alzheimer’s, and has begun to speak only Irish.
Thirst Trap (Picador, June) by Gráinne O’Hare, set in her native Belfast, follows three housemates grieving their friend’s tragic death.
Rembrandt’s Promise (Eriu, March) by Barbara Leahy follows the relationship between an impoverished widow and a famous painter.
Short story collection Tenterhooks (Banshee, February) by Irish French writer Claire-Lise Kieffer depicts the bonds that hold couples, families and communities together with a sharp, humane and deeply original slant.
In Open, Heaven (Jonathan Cape) by poet and academic Seán Hewitt, author of memoir All Down Darkness Wide, two teenage boys in a north of England town meet and their lives are transformed.
In The Gatsby Gambit (Renegade, April) by Claire Anderson-Wheeler, the world of F Scott Fitzgerald’s classic becomes the setting for an Agatha-Christie-style murder mystery.
Deep Burn (Marrowbone, September) by Brendan Mac Evilly, author of the non-fiction book, At Swim, and editor of Holy Show, centres on a photographer who burns emotionally charged objects in picturesque settings and photographs them.
Ordinary Saints (Manilla, April) by Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin tells of a queer Irish woman who finds out that her dead brother may become a Catholic saint.
Rose Keating’s debut short story collection, Oddbody (Canongate, July), blends literary horror and gothic to delve into uncomfortable and taboo aspects of the female experience.
International fiction
It is not every year that new novels by two Nobel Prize winners are published. Theft (Bloomsbury, March) by 2021 laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah is the story of the intertwined lives of three young people coming-of-age in postcolonial east Africa.
We Do Not Part (Hamish Hamilton, February) by last year’s laureate Han Kang is a hymn to friendship, a eulogy to the imagination and above all an indictment against forgetting, exploring a massacre that took place in Korea 70 years ago.
Ripeness (May) by Sarah Moss (Ghost Wall, Summerwater) is set in England, Italy and Ireland, exploring familial love and the communities we create, migration, new beginnings and what it is to have somewhere to belong.
Dream Count (Fourth Estate, March) is the first novel in 10 years by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Americanah, We Should All Be Feminists), the story of four Nigerian women and their loves, longings and desires.
Atmosphere (June) by Taylor Jenkins Reid (Daisy Jones & The Six) is a love story set against the backdrop of the 1980s space shuttle programme.
Sweat (Penguin, January) by Emma Healey, Costa First Novel Award winner for Elizabeth is Missing, is the story of Liam and Cassie. Nothing could break their intense love for one another, not his obsessive desire for physical perfection or his relentless control of her life. Until he pushes Cassie far beyond her limits.
In The Emperor of Gladness (Jonathan Cape, May) by Ocean Vuong, a wayward young man becomes caregiver to an 82-year-old widow living with dementia.
Sister Europe (Viking, April) by Nell Zink tells the story of one wild night in Berlin, as a ragtag group meet at the Hotel Interconti to celebrate an elderly author’s venerable career.
Trans life past, present and future is explored in Stag Dance (Serpent’s Tail, March) by Torrey Peters, a kaleidoscopic follow-up to the Women’s Prize-nominated Detransition, Baby.
It’s the day before her daughter’s wedding and things are not going well for Gail Baines in Anne Tyler’s Three Days in June (Chatto & Windus, February).
Show, Don’t Tell (Doubleday, February) by Curtis Sittenfeld (Romantic Comedy, American Wife) promises 12 witty stories exploring marriage, fame and female friendship.
Flesh (Jonathan Cape, March) by Booker-shortlisted author David Szalay finds a young Hungarian swept up into the company of London’s super-rich, with his own competing impulses for love, status and wealth winning him unimaginable riches, until they threaten to undo him completely.
In Never Flinch (Hoffer & Stoughton, May) by Stephen King police receive a letter threatening to “kill 13 innocents and one guilty” in “an act of atonement for the needless death of an innocent man” and an outspoken women’s rights activist is being targeted.
Fundamentally (W & N, February) by Nussaibah Younis is about a heartbroken academic, Nadia, leading a chaotic UN scheme to deradicalise Isis brides in Iraq. She bonds with Sara, a young woman from east London. It is described as a “Muslim fleabag”.
From the author of bestselling novel American Dirt, Jeanine Cummins’ new novel, Speak to Me of Home (Tinder Press, May) is a multigenerational story that examines marriage, family and identity.
A Family Matter (Chatto & Windus, May) by Claire Lynch, author of the memoir Small: On Motherhoods, is the story of a family torn apart by secrets and their own best intentions.
Death at the White Hart (Michael Joseph, March) is the debut crime novel by Chris Chibnall, creator of hit TV series Broadchurch. It too is a small-town murder mystery.
Sleeping Children (Picador, March) by Anthony Passeron, translated from the French by Frank Wynne, is a novel of class and aspiration, about the impact of Aids on one working-class family and on French society.
The Names (May) by Florence Knapp is partly set in Ireland with a sliding doors storyline. Cora goes to register the name of her son. Her three options, Gordan, Julian and Bear, offer us three alternatives lives for the family.
Broken Country (John Murray, March) by Clare Leslie Hall is an epic love story with the pulse of a thriller that asks: what would you risk for a second chance at first love?
Gunk (Bloomsbury, May) is the first novel from Saba Sams (Send Nudes), exploring love and family. Jules has been divorced from her ex-husband Leon for five years, but she still works alongside him at Gunk, the grotty student nightclub he owns in Brighton.
In Love Forms (Faber, June) by Claire Adam, author of the award-winning Golden Child, a mother searches for the daughter she left behind a lifetime ago.
Madame Sosostris & the Festival for the Broken-Hearted (Apollo, March) by Booker winner Ben Okri promises that hearts will be healed, and broken, but nobody will leave this festival exactly as they arrived.
