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Wild Houses (2024)
8.0/10on Open Library
Published
Ballina is getting ready for its biggest weekend of the year when a kidnapped teenager lands on Dev’s doorstep. This County Mayo crime novel lets you sit with the people a faster thriller might rush past, starting with the man whose cousins have made him an unwilling accomplice.
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Factory Girls (2022)
Published
Maeve Murray wants good exam results and enough money to get out of her Northern Irish border town. The summer job she takes at a shirt factory in 1994 puts Catholic and Protestant workers on the same floor. Read it for the jokes, friendships, and small calculations that go into getting through a shift.
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Cré na cille (1949)
Published
The Dirty Dust, translated by Alan Titley
A new arrival in a Connemara graveyard wants to know whether she’s in the pound grave or the fifteen-shilling grave. The dead go right on feuding and sizing up their neighbors, all through overlapping talk. Choose this English translation of Cré na Cille for the sting and speed of those voices.
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The last September (1929)
4.0/10on Open Library
Published
Tennis parties and army dances are still on the calendar at a County Cork country house in 1920. Follow Lois as she tries to imagine an adult life amid the routines her relatives keep up while British rule is coming to an end. This is a book for readers who like history to register first in a room full of people.
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Colony (2022)
8.0/10on Open Library
Published
The Colony brings an English painter and a French linguist to an island off Ireland’s west coast in 1979. James sees a chance to do something other than fish, and his family has ideas of its own about what the visitors can take from the island. Pick this for the arguments over who gets to represent a place and in what language.
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The glorious heresies (2016)
Published
An accidental killing sends trouble outward through a group of people trying to get by in Cork. McInerney gives the city a fast, foulmouthed energy and follows lives that regularly go unseen by its more comfortable residents. A good choice if you want the invention of a crime novel alongside the complications of a whole city.
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The good son (2015)
Published
Mickey Donnelly’s chances of getting out of Ardoyne can turn on what a grammar school uniform costs. Let his funny, quick voice take you through the Belfast neighborhood during the Troubles, when everyone seems to know what a boy ought to do and Mickey has quite different ideas.
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The Poor Mouth (1974)
Published
Read Patrick C. Power’s translation for an Irish-language satire that takes the stock tale of rural deprivation to absurd lengths. Bonaparte O’Coonassa shares his family’s cabin with the livestock in fictional Corkadoragha. There is a joke in nearly every indignity, and a sharper one in what outsiders expect to find there.
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Reading in the dark (1996)
10.0/10on Open Library
Published
A boy’s childhood in Derry in the 1940s and 1950s comes to you in brief scenes, including an aunt’s ghost story about two children in Donegal. Keep an ear out for what adults leave unsaid. Half-told stories give the city’s political history a place inside the house.
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City of Bohane (2011)
6.0/10on Open Library
Published
For a trip to a west-coast city that only exists on the page, take this hectic gang novel set a few decades into the future. A threatened crime boss pulls you between bogs, backstreets, and tower blocks. The invented slang makes crossing from one part of Bohane to another half the fun.
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The Good People (2016)
Published
In a County Kerry valley in the 1820s, a grandmother turns to a healer when she cannot explain the changes in her grandson. Kent draws you into a community where grief, poverty, and local beliefs give people profoundly different explanations for the same events. It’s a tense historical novel, with the child’s vulnerability at its center.
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The Raptures (2022)
Published
Hannah is still healthy as one classmate after another falls mysteriously ill in fictional Ballylack. This village novel lets the grown-ups argue over causes while a lonely child tries prayer, fear, and guilt on her own. Choose it for a Northern Irish summer in which religion and the uncanny both matter to the people next door.
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Tarry Flynn (1948)
Published
Tarry is a farmer and an aspiring poet hemmed in by what people expect of him in 1930s rural Ireland. Read him for the flashes of lyric attention in the middle of work and family obligations. There is room for both affection and exasperation in his relationship with the place that made him.
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The butcher boy (1992)
6.5/10on Open Library
Published
Francie Brady remembers a small town already talking about what he did. McCabe sticks close to Francie’s comic, unsettling voice and lets the boy tell you what the place thinks of him. Read this if you’re happy to trade an ordinary account of a town for one filtered through a narrator who keeps you off balance.
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Small Things Like These
A coal delivery to a convent puts Bill Furlong in a position to ask what other people in his town quietly accept. In this short novel set in New Ross in 1985, winter work and Christmas obligations show you how much a man with a business and a family has to lose by speaking up.
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Queen of Dirt Island (2022)
8.0/10on Open Library
Published
In The Queen of Dirt Island, four generations of Aylward women hold one another close and drive one another to distraction in Nenagh, County Tipperary. The chapters come in short bursts. You can read a few at a time and still feel the accumulation of remembered stories, quarrels, and small acts of loyalty.
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