Great Books About Ireland

 

I’m 89.2% Scandinavian, but like many of you, I’m a little Irish on St. Patrick’s Day. I make my traditional Beer Braised Corned Beef with Potatoes and Carrots, and Irish Soda Bread. I love a good book about Ireland, too. If you enjoy reading about interesting cultures, maybe you’ll find something to tickle your fancy here.

Nonfiction

  • Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt. This evocative memoir documents an Irish family’s struggles during the Great Depression. [The best memoir I have ever read.]
  • Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman by Nuala O’Faolain. A woman steps out of the traditional shoes she was always told to fill.
  • The Back of Beyond: A Search for the Soul of Ireland by James Charles Roy. Roy, an authority on Irish history, leads a group of Americans on an unconventional tour through the byways of Ireland.
  • How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill. Cahill explains how the “island of saints and scholars” changed the course of world history.
  • Immortal Irishman by Tim Egan. This well-written biography spans three continents to describe the incredible, passionate, and short life of Thomas Francis Meagher.
  • Ireland: A Concise History by Máire and Conor Cruise O’Brien. This is a riveting account of Irish history from pre-Christian Ireland to the Northern Irish civil rights movement.
  • O Come Ye Back to Ireland by Niall Williams and Christine Breen. Two New Yorkers adjust to life in a tiny Irish village after leaving their careers for a simpler life.
  • Round Ireland with a Fridge by Tony Hawks. For a humorous jaunt through the countryside, read Hawks’ account of his attempt to hitchhike around Ireland with a fridge.
  • Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe. Documents the notorious abduction and murder of I.R.A. Troubles victim Jean McConville in 1972 Belfast, exploring how the case reflected the brutal conflicts of Northern Ireland and their ongoing repercussions.
  • A Short History of Ireland by Richard Killeen. Killeen’s well-illustrated book is among the most accessible introductions to Irish history.
  • To School Through the Fields (Alice Taylor, 1988). In one of the best-selling Irish memoirs of all time, Taylor fondly remembers growing up in a rural Irish town.

 

Fiction

  • 1916: A Novel of the Irish Rebellion by Morgan Llywelyn. A fictional portrait of Ireland’s Easter Rising of 1916 follows the events and personalities of the rebellion as chronicled by some of its passionate participants, including poet-rebels Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, and Joseph Plunkett.
  • The Bódhran Makers by John B. Keane. In the 1950s, Canon Tett disapproves of the Irish celebration of Wren Day with a parade led by a person playing the Bodhran (drum) because he thinks it is anti-Catholic.
  • Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín. Colm Tóibín’s sixth novel, Brooklyn, is set in Brooklyn and Ireland in the early 1950s, when one young woman crosses the ocean to make a new life for herself.
  • Cashelmara by Susan Howatch. The dynastic history of three generations of an English/Irish family and the great house that obsesses them.
  • City of Bohane by Kevin Barry. A tale set in a near-future coastal Ireland finds the long-time rule of dapper godfather Logan Hartnett threatened by the return of an old nemesis, the ambitions of once-trusted henchmen, and his wife’s request for him to abandon his life of crime.
  • The Commitments by Roddy Doyle. A group of working-class Irish youths with a passion for the music of Sam Cooke and Otis Redding form a rock ‘n’ roll band and attempt to bring soul to Dublin.
  • The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien. Kate and Baba, two young Irish country girls who have spent their childhood together, leave the safety of their convent school in search of life and love in the city. Kate is dreamy and romantic and yearning for love, while Baba just wants to experience life as a single woman. Although they set out together, their lives take unexpected turns with each learning to find her own way.
  • Circle of Friends by Maeve Binchy. Tells the story of a group of friends starting college in Dublin.
  • Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier. To reclaim the lives of her brothers, Sorcha leaves the only safe place she has known and starts on a journey of pain, loss, and terror.
  • Dubliners by James Joyce. Joyce’s classic short-story collection describes Irish life in the 1900s, told through the experiences of 15 ordinary Dubliners.
  • Eureka Street by Robert McLiam Wilson. As two pals wander the streets of Belfast in search of something better–a better pint, a better job, a better woman, a better now–readers are treated to their hilarious misadventures, political intrigues, and outlandish schemes.
  • Exit Unicorns by Cindy Brandner. The journey begins in the ‘terrible beauty’ of Northern Ireland during a time when conflict reigns and no one is spared from tragedy and sorrow, the time known as The Troubles.
  • Finbar’s Hotel by Dermot Bolger. These novels, about a collection of guests at a Dublin hotel, were collaboratively written, with each chapter penned by a different modern Irish author.
  • Galway Bay by Mary Pat Kelly. A poignant historical family saga set against Ireland’s Great Starvation and the building of Chicago.
  • The Girl in the Castle by Santa Montefiore. A first installment in a trilogy follows the experiences of Kitty, who enjoys a life of privilege on Ireland’s wild countryside at the side of an increasingly resentful best friend and the vet’s son she loves, until the Irish revolt threatens her beloved home.
  • The Ghosts of Belfast by Stuart Neville. Fegan has been a “hard man,” an IRA killer in Northern Ireland. Now that peace has come, he is being haunted day and night by twelve ghosts: a mother and infant, a schoolboy, a butcher, an RUC constable, and seven others of his innocent victims. To appease them, he’s going to have to kill the men who gave him orders.
  • The Green Road by Anne Enright. When Christmas day reunites the Madigan children, who all left their mother Rosaleen behind to follow their dreams, under one roof in County Clare, Ireland, they each must confront the terrible weight of family ties and the journey that brought them home.
  • The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne. In 1945, Cyril Avery was born to an unmarried teenager and adopted by a wealthy if rather eccentric Dublin couple. As readers, we visit Cyril every seven years, as he grows and comes to terms with his sexuality in a violently repressive Ireland, flees his home country, and falls in love.
  • Himself by Jess Kidd. When Mahony returns to Mulderrig, a speck of a place on Ireland’s west coast, he brings only a photograph of his long-lost mother and a determination to do battle with the village’s lies.
  • In the Woods by Tana French. Twenty years after witnessing the violent disappearances of two companions from their small Dublin suburb, detective Rob Ryan investigates a chillingly similar murder that takes place in the same wooded area, a case that forces him to piece together his traumatic memories.
  • Ireland by Frank Delaney. Delaney’s historical epic follows Ronan O’Mara on his journey to find a beloved Irish storyteller.
  • The Last Prince of Ireland by Morgan Llywelyn. An Irishman and his clan are determined to hold onto their homeland following the 1601 Battle of Kinsale, in which the Gaelic nobility were defeated by English invaders.
  • Midwinter Break by Bernard MacLaverty. A retired couple struggling with his dogmatic forgetfulness and her religious faith attempt to repair their marriage during a vacation in Amsterdam, where they confront painful memories of a troubled time in their native Ireland.
  • Normal People by Sally Rooney. The unconventional secret childhood bond between a popular boy and a lonely, intensely private girl is tested by character reversals in their first year at a Dublin college that render one introspective and the other social, but self-destructive.
  • Northern Spy by Flynn Berry. Certain that her beloved sister did not join the IRA by choice, a Catholic BBC producer confronts impossible decisions that test family bonds, the limits of her ideals and her responsibilities as a mother.
  • The Nothing Man by Catherine Ryan Howard. At the age of twelve, Eve Black was the only member of her family to survive an encounter with serial attacker the Nothing Man. Now an adult, she is obsessed with identifying the man who destroyed her life.
  • The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. An exquisitely beautiful young man in Victorian England retains his youthful and innocent appearance over the years while his portrait reflects both his age and evil soul as he pursues a life of decadence and corruption.
  • The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Many by James Joyce. Stephen Dedalus, a sensitive and creative youth, rebels against his family, his education, and his country by committing himself to the artist’s life.
  • The Princes of Ireland by Edward Rutherfurd. This novel recreates such events as the mission of Saint Patrick, the Viking invasion, and the trickery of Henry II that led to England’s establishment in Ireland.
  • The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue. A novel set in 1918 Dublin offers a three-day look at a maternity ward during the height of the Great Flu pandemic.
  • PS, I Love You by Cecelia Ahern. A novel set in 1918 Dublin offers a three-day look at a maternity ward during the height of the Great Flu pandemic.
  • The Sea by John Banville. Following the death of his wife, Max Morden retreats to the seaside town of his childhood summers, where his own life becomes inextricably entwined with the members of the vacationing Grace family.
  • Seek the Fair Land by Walter Macken. The first book in a trilogy examining the adventures of several generations of one Irish family. Set amidst the Cromwellian Invasions in 1641, Dominick McMahon has little appetite for fighting, yet is forced to defend his town against Cromwell’s army.
  • A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle. Doyle’s political thriller, set in Ireland during the 1916 Easter Rising, is narrated by the young Henry Smart, a soldier in the Irish Citizen Army.
  • Tipperary by Frank Delaney. Charles O’Brien falls in love with April Burke, a beautiful, much younger Englishwoman, when he offers to help her reclaim and restore her family’s Irish estate, in a saga set against the Irish struggle to regain land taken from them by England’s colonization
  • Trinity by Leon Uris. Uris dramatizes the sectarian struggles in the decades just prior to modern Irish independence.
  • Ulysses by James Joyce. A day in the life of Leopold Bloom, whose odyssey through the streets of turn-of-the-century Dublin leads him through trials that parallel those of Ulysses on his epic journey home.
  • What the Wind Knows by Amy Harmon. Anne Gallagher travels to her grandfather’s childhood home in Ireland to spread his ashes and finds herself pulled into Ireland of 1921.
  • The Yellow House by Patricia Falvey. The story of a fiery young woman fighting to reunite her family and reclaim their ancestral home during the war for Irish Independence.
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