Christine Dwyer Hickey
Reading The Narrow Land – a novel set in post-war Cape Cod – is like experiencing the work of Scott F. Fitzgerald. There’s that same atmospheric sense of long hot summers, with people extracting as much…
Tana French
It’s twelve years since I interviewed Tana French for her first crime book, the multi-prize winning, Into The Woods, and we’ve not met since. This, in itself, is unusual, since the publishing scene in Dublin is…
Patricia Gibney
Patricia and I meet in The Clayton Hotel in Dublin. She’s spent the night there after a book club event but didn’t get a whole lot of sleep. The reason? Back in Mullingar, her daughter was…
Eoin McNamee
When John Cole arrives at a former Northern Irish military aerodrome to identify a woman’s body, old secrets start to surface. But what is the connection with Hooper, a black serviceman who hung in World War…
Margaret Kelleher
Back in August 1882, a gang of men entered a tiny homestead in Maamtrasna, County Galway, and murdered five of the occupants. John Joyce, his wife Bridget, mother Margaret, son Michael and daughter Peggy, who died…
Billy O’Callaghan
Back in 2000, Billy O’Callaghan visited Coney Island. He was only there for an afternoon – whilst on a two-week whistle-stop tour of Boston and New York – but he loved the island for its relative…
Lesley Pearce
Lesley Pearce’s life reads like one of her novels. Left motherless at three, she ended up in a Victorian style orphanage, to be rescued, three years later, by a stepmother who was then cold towards her….
Debut Roundup for Books Ireland, January 2019.
Sweet Home. By Wendy Erskine. The Stinging Fly. There’s been some impressive writing to come out of Northern Ireland in recent years, and the latest, a collection of stories published by The Stinging Fly, focuses on…
Hazel Gaynor
Hazel Gaynor has long been fascinated with Grace Darling, the Northumbrian heroine who, in 1828, risked her life to rescue the survivors of a shipwreck. She learned about her in primary school. “Grace’s story had everything,”…
Debut Roundup. November and December
Notes to Self. Emilie Pine. Tramp Press. The opening essay in Emilie Pine’s excellent collection, takes us to Corfu, where Emilie and her sister discover the inadequacies of the Greek health system. Their father’s liver, abused…
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne
Five years ago, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s husband died after a short illness. An internationally renowned folklorist, Bo Almqvist, who was 20 years Éilís’s senior, had been, simply, the love of her life. His death left her…
Dacre Stocker
With our minds on Halloween ghouls, comes a prequel about Dracula, the vampire invented by the Irish writer Bram Stoker back in 1897. An old Count who drank the blood of his victims; killing some, and…