Irish Fiction

Novel.

Meditates on contemporary Ireland in three novellas that shadow one another. Touching on issues relating to language, religion, history and economics, Muir offers a poignant reflection on Ireland and its people as they buckle under the forces of globalisation.

A retelling of a ‘Fionn’ tale written in the 15th Century. New illustrated edition (2020)

This is the first appearance in English of six-year-old Lewy and his unique, impressionistic account of a tumultuous few months in the early 1920s. A vivid, warm voice brought to us from the Irish by Mícheál Ó hAodha in this translation of Eoghan Ó Tuairisc’s novella, An Lomnochtán (1977).

Where whispers carry as much weight as the secrets they cradle.

Written over the course of ten years, while the author has been living in America’s northeast and southeast, Mary O’Donoghue’s stories in The Hour After Happy Hour reach into the wounds of immigration, transit, and exile.

I thought of life's many bounties, to have known the extremities of joy and sorrow, love, success and failure, fame and slaughter, to have read in the newspapers that as a writer I was past my sell-by date, yet regardless, to go on writing and reading, to be lucky enough to live in these two intensities that have buttressed my whole life.

After leaving for a religious community in Belgium, a young woman remembers her childhood in rural Ireland. She reflects on the rituals of village life, the people she encountered, and the enchanting beauty of the landscape. Her mind then turns to the shocking event that led to her departure.

Features stories of families, feuds, enchantment, disenchantment and the manifold bonds of love. These stories are about the tension between country and city life, the instinct towards escape and nostalgia for home; and always in shimmering prose.

The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls trilogy begins in August 2019. Banned in several countries on first publication, Edna O'Brien's August is a Wicked Month is a simmering, sansual tale of a woman rediscovering herself on the French Riviera.

The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls trilogy begins in August 2019. Edna O'Brien's haunting spectre of a novel, Night, is narrated by one of her most memorable characters, Mary Hooligan.

The new novel by the legendary Edna O'Brien, author of The Country Girls (dramatised on BBC Radio 4 in August 2019). Captured, abducted and married into Boko Haram, the narrator of this story witnesses and suffers the horrors of a community of men governed by a brutal code of violence.