Seventy-one books were nominated by 83 libraries around the world for the Dublin Literary Award. All 71 were read by each of the five judges – God bless them – who chose this shortlist. Three authors are North American, one from Argentina, one Irish, and one Dutch.
The 2025 Dublin Literary Award shortlist
- Not a River by Selva Almeda, translated by Annie McDermot
- We are Light by Gerta Blees, translated by Michele Hutchison
- The Adversary by Michael Crummey
- James by Percival Everet
- Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
- North Woods by Daniel Mason
We’ll start at home. By now, many would have read Paul Lynch’s dystopian Booker Prize winning Prophet Song. “Liberal, internationalist, outward facing” is how Patrick Freyne described Ireland recently in The Irish Times. How does our robustly democratic society – seventh most democratic country in the world – descend into totalitarianism?
Alas, we can surely guess but we are not told in this story, which deals with the consequences for an ordinary family, rather than with the politics precipitating the disaster. Anyway, while the novel’s setting is contemporary Dublin, place is lightly sketched, and defamiliarised. Real street names mix with fictional ones, or borrowings – Prince’s Street, St Laurence Street. The passport office has moved back to Molesworth Street.
What the novel deals with is not so much place as the devastating experience of dismayed involuntary displacement from wherever we are at home. Written without paragraph breaks, which intensifies the mood of chaos and urgency, it’s mainly from the point of view of Eilish, a scientist who loses her job early in the book and spends most of her time cooking and shopping and driving her kids to school.
The wonderful everyday of the supermarket and the schoolyard in all their dull boredom becomes more and more desirable under the ever-darkening shadow of the police state, censorship, war. The sufferings many endure right now in distant lands are fascinatingly transferred to a middle-class family in the most liberal progressive streets of south Dublin (feels like Dublin 8). A timely fable.
If anything could be several shades darker than Prophet Song, it is The Adversary, by the Newfoundland poet and novelist Michael Crummey. His sixth novel – many have won prestigious prizes – it is set in a fishing village on the island, in the unspecified past – sometime in the early 19th century. It focuses on a feud between the ghastly Abe Strapp – a despot, perhaps suggestive of Donald Trump (but what fictional villain isn’t these days?) – and his sister, The Widow Caines, a sort of Gentleman Jack type, but without the humour, the sexiness or the warmth. Cain and Abel. How could this possibly end?
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Everything is outlandishly and exaggeratedly bleak – dreadful weather, cruel and violent people, abused girls and boys. There is plenty of graphic horror, although of a convincing nature – for instance, a child-bride of the awful Abe has her arm scalded by him in a fit of drunken rage. We observe the arm slowly putrefying, for weeks, until it’s amputated on the kitchen table by The Beadle (many characters have Harry Potterish names). Minutes later she goes into labour and gives birth to a dead child, already in pieces in utero – we’re also treated to this scene. (Mercifully the girl herself dies soon afterwards). Floggings, rapes, drunken brawls, abound. The “sparrow mumble” game made me feel sick.
I wondered who The Adversary was until I remember that An tAibhirseoir was a common name for the Devil in Irish. Satan, in many of his guises, populates these pages. It’s shocking but extremely compelling – rather like, I thought, a horror novel or video for children, although this one is very much for adult readers. And the language is darkly delicious.
Selva Almada’s Not a River was written in the dialect of the region in which it is located, Entre Ríos, Argentina. The Spanish is reportedly rich and stunning. While the translation is fluid and lovely, it is not possible to know if it reflects this or not – or if it could, as indeed a note by the translator, Annie McDermot, on the challenges posed by her task, indicates.
It’s difficult to synopsise this short novel, which involves many characters and intertwining themes. Two middle-aged friends, Enero and El Negro, leave town to go on a fishing trip on the Paraná river, with a young man, Tilo. Tilo is the son of their old friend, Eusébio, who died in an accident, or by suicide, or killed by a vengeful fish, in the same place, on another such outing 20 years earlier. The narrative is not linear but moves back and forth, mostly clearly but sometimes confusingly – especially as the book moves towards its conclusion, where we are perhaps encountering dream rather than reality.
Almada has said that she wanted to show the poverty, the desperation, to which her own community in Argentina has been driven by a right-wing government. All that escaped me as I read, although poverty, and the way it brutalises men and victimises women, is clearly depicted. There’s much exquisite evocation of nature – the river, the fish, the woods – which gives lustre to the tragic themes.
Not much nature in Gerda Blees’s We Are Light, which is mostly set indoors. An extraordinary novel, highly original and readable, it’s about a criminal investigation into how Elisabeth, a member of a kinky commune, “Sound and Love”, came to die. We know the answer – she starved to death, participating in an experiment instigated by her sister, Melodie, to test the effect of fasting for a limited period – weeks – on the mind and spirit.
So the novel is dealing with issues such as anorexia, offbeat anti-science theorists, coercion within groups driven by quirky, not to say idiotic, ideologies. What is impressively imaginative is that the story is told by various people, objects and phenomena involved in the story. Each chapter opens with the words “We are”. “We are the parents.” “We are Elizabeth’s body.” “We are two cigarettes.” “We are oranges.” The first chapter is “We are Night” and the last “We are Light.” This ingenious device reminds me of books for young children (Now we are Seven, We are in a Book), although in fact, in an afterward, the author suggests she got the idea from the title of an adult book and her story is inspired by a real-life event.
Curiously, given that it’s about someone who starved to death, it is one of the more lighthearted novels on the list. The translator is Michele Hutchison.
Daniel Mason’s North Woods is an elegy for diseased and deceased trees – the elm, the chestnut, the ash. A history of a house in the woods of Massachusetts, it’s more like a collection of short stories interlinked by their setting than a novel. The opening story is the classic “redeemed captive” diary – 17th century, the cabin is attacked by Red Indians, as they’re called at the time, and everyone slaughtered apart from the young wife and her baby.
This is followed by an account of the planting of the orchard, by a pomologist, who grafts a new apple, the Osgood. His daughters, Mary and Alice Osgood, inherit house and orchard. We read of their rivalry and tragic ending. Next up is a gripping narrative told from the point of view of a man whose profession is to hunt for runaway slaves, followed by a mellow epistolary story by a secretly gay painter, in love with a writer. And so on.
The closing episode focuses on an impoverished part-time lecturer carrying out research on the forest. The stories of typical New England types over the centuries cross-reference occasionally – the landscape painter refers to portraits of Mary and Alice Osgood. A stuffed mountain lion from one episode makes a dramatic reappearance later.
The novel has been criticised – in The Irish Times, and by one of my favourite reviewers – who asks “Can you stay glued to a novel if its protagonist is not a human being but a house?” Absolutely. I imagine the layers of history to be particularly thin in Massachusetts. Walking in the woods you sense the past – an illusion, perhaps, created by the region’s wealth of great literature. The depth, the culture, the complex beauty, as well as the dark side, of New England are marvellously captured in this enchanting book. I loved it.
Finally, we have James, by Percival Everett. Shortlisted for the Booker in 2024, it lost out to the less impressive Orbital. James is a version of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, told from the point of view of James (N***er Jim in the original book – the n-word is used a few times in this retelling, difficult to avoid writing about antebellum America, but I wonder if that word cost him the Booker). James follows the original storyline fairly closely – going down the Mississippi, encountering various hilariously comical and viciously dangerous characters – the most striking of which were created by Mark Twain but deserve disinterring.
The narrator is a highly (self-) educated man, who reads voraciously, in secret, and teaches young slaves to read and write, and code switch. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them ... The better they feel, the safer we are”, or “Da mo’ betta dey feels, da mo’ safer we be”, in “the correct incorrect grammar” required by what Jim calls “situational translations”.
I know which novel I like best. Also, which I would put money on in a bookie’s. I’ll be chuffed if any of my favourites carry off the €100,000 prize, which is sponsored by Dublin City Council, on May 22nd. All six are deserving, as are many which didn’t make the shortlist. At the top of the league, these competitions are a bit of a lottery. But what fun for spectators. With bated breath, I await the decision of the adjudicators.
