In The Irish Times on Saturday, Michael Connelly tells Fiona Gartland about his new thriller, The Proving Ground. There is an extract from Terry Prone‘s new memoir, I’m Glad You Asked Me That: The Political Years. Donal Fallon, social historian to Dublin City Council Culture Company, and presenter of the Three Castles Burning podcast, discusses his new book, The Dublin Pub. Carl Kinsella talks to Patrick Freyne about his first book, At Least it Looks Good from Space: A Catalogue of Modern, Millennial and Personal Catastrophes. And there is a Q&A with Chloe Michelle Howarth about her award-winning debut Sunburn and her new novel, Heap Earth Upon It.
Reviews are Christopher Kissane on Making Ireland Modern: The Transformation of Society and Culture by Enda Delaney; Tony Clayton-Lea on the best new music books; Mícheál McCann on the best new poetry collections; John O’Donnell on The Only Way I Know by Andy Farrell; Padraic Fogarty on Green Crime by Julia Shaw; Catherine Toal on Aftershock by Liz McSkeane; Neasa MacErlean on 1929: Inside the Crash by Andrew Ross Sorkin; Lucy Sweeney Byrne on The Four Spent the Day Together by Chris Kraus; Mei Chin on The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits; Donald Clarke on What’s With Baum? by Woody Allen; Mark Hennessy on Political Change across Britain and Ireland, edited by Paul Gillespie et al.; and Thomas Fitzgerald on Where Love and Imagination Colour the Dark: Essays on Thomas Kinsella.
This weekend’s Irish Times Eason offer is The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware, just €5.99, a €6 saving.
Niamh Connolly, a debut novelist from Cork and winner of last year’s Women’s Prize Discoveries Award, has signed a six-figure, two-book deal with Hodder & Stoughton.
The first, a “heartbreaking and poignant love story”, We Go Way Back, will be published as a lead title in spring 2027.
Spanning decades, We Go Way Back is billed as a “read-in-one-sitting, will-they-won’t-they love story that is funny, tender, sexy and moving”, as well as a “heartbreaking novel about friendship, forgiveness, grief and mental health”.
Lucy Stewart, deputy publishing director, said: “I will always remember and cherish my first read of We Go Way Back. I feel as though I have been searching for a book that can move and affect me like this one has for my whole career, and to have finally found it feels very special. This is a love story for the ages, but it’s also about so much more.
“Niamh’s ability to write about mental health in a way that is both crippling for readers’ emotions and yet still relatable and readable is a talent not many people possess. I am in awe of her, and could not be more honoured to be working with her to bring this book to readers. I don’t know if my colleagues will ever forgive me for quite how much this book has broken us all, emotionally speaking, but that feels like a small price to pay to have the total privilege of publishing something quite like this.”
Connolly has an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia, and a BA in English and history from University College Cork.
Connolly said: “I’m over the moon that I’ll be working with Lucy, and that Hodder & Stoughton is going to be the home of my debut. Thank you to Lucy and the Hodder team for their passion for this story. And thank you to my wonderful agent, Rosie, for finding We Go Way Back such a brilliant home. Special thanks also to the Women’s Prize for their support of my writing.”
Connolly was chosen from almost 3,000 entries as the winner of the Women’s Prize Trust’s 2024 Discoveries Writing Prize for her novel-in-progress, We Go Way Back, whose working title then was Game Theory, which is set in Co Cork and deals with bereavement, friendship, financial disparity, miscommunication and loneliness.
*
Áine Ní Ghlinn & Rita Ann Higgins: A Bilingual Reading and Conversation with Laureate for Irish Fiction Éilís Ní Dhuibhne takes place on November 6th at 1pm at the National Library of Ireland, where the poets will read and discuss their work in both languages. Áine Ní Ghlinn and Rita Ann Higgins speak truth, in Irish and English, through bold, unsentimental poems. From silence, survival and loss, to class, wit, and cultural memory, they challenge and provoke.
*
Gardening Leave, the debut poetry collection by Eoin Devereux, will be launched by Donal Ryan and Sarah Moore Fitzgerald at O’Mahony’s Bookstore Limerick on November 6th at 6.30pm.
Devereux is a Professor at the University of Limerick where he teaches on creative writing in the community. His poetry has been published in journals and anthologies in Ireland, the UK and the US.
The collection, published by 451 Editions, has been described by poet Martin Dyar as “beautifully free-flowing, dramatic and mature. Gardening Leave announces a poet committed to the humane craft of making the lyrical voice resound as a social instrument and as a gift for every reader”
*
A discussion entitled Learning From the Neighbours: Multiculturalism in Ireland and the UK is to take place at the European Parliament Liaison Office in Ireland, Europe House, 5 Balfe Street, Dublin 2 on Monday, November 3rd, from 6 to 8pm.
The 21st century has witnessed rapid changes around the world, perhaps nowhere more than in Ireland. In recent years, Ireland has become multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multicultural, transforming the place into something akin to its British neighbour.
While Irish diversity has its own unique character that is untainted by a legacy of Empire, not everyone is at ease with the rapidly changing face of Ireland. So what does the diversity of Irishness look like today and what are the problems facing those at the forefront? And how does this compare to the experiences of their British neighbours? Can lessons be learned from each other?
Join Trinity Dublin Professor and writer Philomena Mullen and Queen’s University Belfast lecturer historian Kieran Connell for an evening of discussion and insights, chaired by author and broadcaster Emer O’Neill. This event is free but you need to reserve a place at events-epdublin@europarl.europa.eu
*
The Irish Writers Centre is delighted to announce the judges for the 2025 installment of its flagship annual literary initiative, the International Debut Novel Competition. The competition awards twelve unpublished novelists with the opportunity to pitch their novels to world-class publishers and literary agents. This year, the centre invited submissions for the competition between August 1st and September 14th, attracting a record number of entries.
Judging is currently underway and the twelve winners of the International Debut Novel Competition will be announced in November. On December 4th and 5th the centre will host a two-day hybrid pitching event, where winners will have the chance to present their novels to leading figures in the publishing industry.
The centre is delighted to welcome to the panel of judges a diverse range of critically acclaimed writers: David Butler, Mary Anne Butler, Conor Kostick, Nuala O’Connor, Cauvery Madhavan and Kerry Neville. For more information, please see
*
Last week the shortlist was announced for the Baillie Gifford Prize, which recognises narrative excellence and originality in non-fiction writing.
The shortlist includes Richard Holmes for The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief, in which we witness Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrestling with mind-altering ideas about geology and deep time, the vastness, beauty, and terror of the new cosmology, and the challenges of social revolution.
Frances Wilson is recognised for Electric Spark, which explores not the celebrated Dame Muriel Spark but the apprentice mage discovering her powers.
Also on this year’s shortlist is Helen Garner, one of Australia’s greatest writers, for her collected diaries How to End a Story.
Justin Marozzi is included for Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World, a remarkable collection of historical human tragedy, which traces the variety of enslavement in the Islamic world, and brings to life voices from the eighth to the twentieth centuries.
Another sweeping and extensively researched historical narrative is Jason Burke’s The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s. Set against the backdrop of the Cold War and packed with revelations about iconic events, Burke takes us into the lives and minds of the perpetrators of the deadly operations in the West in the 1970s.
Finally, Adam Weymouth’s Lone Wolf throws a unique light on Europe’s mountainous hinterlands at a moment of political and environmental change, by documenting an epic walk across the Alps in the footsteps of a young wolf from Slovenia to the north of Verona.
The winner will be announced at a ceremony in London on November 4th.
*
The National Library of Ireland, Kildare Street, Dublin will host the launch of Thirty Years of Change Through Women’s Eyes: Ireland, 1993-2023 (Attic/Cork University Press,
2025), on October 30th, from 6 to 8pm. This is the final work in a trilogy of books documenting Irish women’s experiences over 100 years, from 1920s to 2020s, all published by Attic/Cork University Press.
The author is Íde B O’Carroll, an Irish-born social researcher and author who has worked for many years on social change issues in Ireland, Europe and America. She divides her time between Amherst, Massachusetts, and Lismore, Co Waterford.
*
Leitrim author Monica Corish received two prizes at the 2025 CAP Awards in Dublin – best Fiction novel, and the Golden CAP Award for the best independently published book. LeafLight Moon evokes the story of the fateful encounter between the First Farmers and the hunter-gatherers who had lived in Ireland for thousands of years. Booker Prize winner Paul Lynch announced the Golden CAP award in a short video. The CAP Awards serve as a fund-raiser for Aware.ie, a mental health charity.
Corish will read from LeafLight Moon on Saturday, November 1st in the Glens Centre, Manorhamilton. She will also launch the novel in conversation with memoirist Olive Travers at the 2025 Allingham Festival on Sunday, November 9th at 1.30pm in the Abbey Arts Centre, Ballyshannon.
*
Christina Hennemann has just released her debut poetry collection, Birthmark (Shearsman Books), exploring growing up, becoming and belonging through vivid landscapes from her German roots and Irish home. Her poems weave personal history with ancient mythologies, examining gender, class and sexuality against intergenerational trauma.
Patrick Cotter praises her “personal mythology inventive and original; with language cadent, elegant and sonically sparkling.” Hennemann has won the Cerasus Poetry Chapbook Competition and received Arts Council Ireland funding.
It will be launched on November 15th in The Winding Stair, Dublin, from 6.30 to 8.30pm. Free & all welcome.
*
For the concluding event of Banville at 80, Wexford Public Library Services programme in appreciation of the author’s writing life, we present The Interview - John Banville in Conversation with Professor Derek Hand in Wexford Library, Thursday 23rd October at 7pm.
This is a free event however booking is essential. Places can be booked via this link https://wexfordcoco.libcal.com/event/4429547 or by contacting Wexford Library on 053 9196760.
