7 Books by Irish Authors Everyone Should Read

Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry (2023)

Named a best book of 2023 by NPR, The New Yorker and The Washington Post, Barry’s ninth novel focuses on Tom Kettle, a 66-year-old recently retired police officer. Kettle has settled in a cottage near the Irish Sea, seeking only to be “stationary, happy and useless.” But his solitude is disturbed by two former colleagues with unsettling questions about a long-ago case that dredge up dark memories. It’s a story of old ghosts and an unraveling mind fueled by Barry’s hallmark lyrical prose (he is not only a novelist, but a poet and playwright). “People endured horrors, and then they couldn’t talk about them,” Barry writes. “The real stories of the world were bedded in silence.” 

Riverhead Books

Trespasses by Louise Kennedy (2022)

This searing debut novel tells the story of Cushla, a teacher, Catholic and part-time pub worker in a town near Belfast during the Troubles in 1975. Cushla has an affair with a Protestant barrister who defends members of the Irish Republican Army, and the conflicts in her life and in Northern Ireland soon become intwined. Kennedy knows the topic intimately. Her family owned a pub in Northern Ireland that was bombed twice when she was a girl. For decades, she worked in pubs and restaurants, then joined a writing group after a cancer diagnosis in her late 40s. The result: late-bloomer literary success with Trespasses at age 55. Kennedy has also written a collection of short stories, The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac.   

Hogarth

The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne (2017)

“Long before we discovered that he had fathered two children by two different women, one in Drimoleague and one in Clonakilty, Father James Monroe stood on the altar of the Church of Our Lady, Star of the Sea, in the parish of Goleen, West Cork, and denounced my mother as a whore.” How’s that for an opening line? In a tale spanning 60 years, readers enjoy not only the birth-to-death journey of an adopted boy and his search for identity and home, but the story of post-World War II Ireland. Boyne has published 15 novels for adults and six for young readers; his book The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is the best-selling novel worldwide by an Irish writer.  

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch (2023)

This disturbing 2023 Booker Prize winner focuses on a scientist and mother of four, Eilish Stack, who tries to hold her family together as modern Ireland descends into a nightmarish authoritarianism, with citizens’ civil liberties eroded. Eilish’s husband goes missing, and her life becomes concentrated on survival, for her and her children. Told without paragraph breaks or quotation marks, it “has a breathless, claustrophobic atmosphere,” according to The Guardian, whose glowing review describes the book as “a brilliant, haunting novel that should be placed into the hands of policymakers everywhere.” Others have compared it to the Margaret Atwood classic, The Handmaid’s Tale.

Viking

The Queen of Dirt Island by Donal Ryan (2023) 

When Ryan wrote this warm, compelling novel, he was inspired by the women who raised him, particularly his strong, fierce mother. That admiration shows as the novel follows four generations of women in Ireland’s Tipperary County, using a series of vignettes — no chapter exceeds 500 words — to tell a tale of love, joy and grief. On each page, Ryan’s language sparkles. One character describes her mother’s speech as “utterances flung around like fistfuls of confetti, vaguely aimed and scattered randomly.” Ryan’s hope, he has said, is that readers of the book feel “privy to some great secret” and discover that “through all of the awfulness that abounds in the world there is always light.” Mission accomplished. His mom must be proud.