Sinéad Gleeson on the former Slits guitarist’s excavation of the lives of her parents

Translating Ovid, Virgil, Homer and Sophocles has accompanied Irish literature’s shift to an increasingly global outlook

The former FBI director doesn’t his mince words about President Trump

Donal Ryan can blow attractive life into a character no matter how compromised, mean or dreary

Shaun Walker charts Putin’s mission to fill the Soviet void; Michel Eltchaninoff traces Putinism

Ed O’Loughlin on Alexis Okeowo’s account of ordinary Africans fighting extremism

John Boyne on a novel of family life, exile and conflict between siblings

Roy Foster and others show the humanities’ role in urgent contemporary debate

Parts of this series are original and provocative. Others are missed opportunities

Fintan O’Toole on Christopher Fitz-Simon’s edition of the great theatre director’s delightfully lively letters

Maya Jasanoff views Conrad’s troubled life through the lenses of his four greatest novels

An inventive debut about the conflicting impulses of smart millennial women

Mary Beard looks for the roots of women’s exclusion from decisionmaking

Breandán Mac Suibhne offers an extraordinary, provocative view of rural Ireland

Peter Fallon was wary of taking on the Greek poet Hesiod. He shouldn’t have been

The ITV political editor’s enlightened Keynesianism comes wrapped in Alan Partridgism

After Ireland review:Fintan O’Toole on a witty, engaging but sometimes baffling take on literature since 1945

George Saunders’s first novel focuses on the death of Abraham Lincoln’s son Willie. Despite its highly original conceit it’s his most straightforward fiction

Susan McKay on Martin Dillon’s memoir of his life and journalism

Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe on an IMF insider’s analysis of all that went wrong

Roy Foster on Clair Wills’s often scintillating study of people who cross borders

Malachi O’Doherty has written better books, writes Susan McKay

Ireland’s smallest county – the Boyne Valley in particular – brims with history

A marginalised Yorkshire family battle their community in a well-written but flawed debut from Fiona Mozley

John Banville on the awe, inquisitiveness and humility at the heart of the scientist’s follow-up to Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

Newspapers are struggling. So charge online readers, but give them value for money

Church, State and Social Science in Ireland review: Peter Murray and Maria Feeney details the church's attempts to control research

Orlagh Collins’ debut YA novel gives a snapshot of everything from bankruptcy to first love

I Found My Tribe review: Ruth Fitzmaurice's memoir is inspiring and humbling, writes Marian Keyes

Neel Mukherjee’s novel is intimate and universal, concrete and elusive

Matt Haig enjoys himself in this worthy addition to the time-travel canon

Protagonist Rachel tells the story of a life in limbo. Although tender, it is never sentimental

‘The Gallows Pool’, ‘Exquisite’, ‘Bad Blood’, ‘Can You Hear Me?’ and ‘The City of Lies’

Daniel Kehlmann is a formidable observer with a flair for articulating dysfunctional behaviour

Roy Keane and Michael Jordan fail to make the cut in Sam Walker’s quixotic study of leadership

Liam Kirwan’s ‘inside’ look is repetitive, hectoring and devoid of nuance or context

Nuala O’Connor’s deft short stories blend caustic irreverence and poignancy

Peter van Agtmael’s photography exudes the careful composition of a wary eye

Harry Clifton’s collection is haunted by another canal bank saunterer and sonneteer, who also began his second act here

Paula McGrath captures 1980s Dublin in a tale of middle age, an orphan and a boxer