Discovering books set in Ireland...
Take me straight to the
books!
The rolling hills of Ireland have long inspired
writers, and there is hardly a literary tradition that is more respected than that of the Irish.
But Ireland has been through enormous change in recent years, and the contemporary fiction in its
wake gives us great insight into the Emerald Isle of today. Time to explore some books set in
Ireland...
Novels like Hand in the Fire by Hugo Hamilton or Trevor Byrne's Ghosts and Lightning bring us contemporary Dublin, with its recent waves of
immigration and huge construction boom. But it is the plethora of quality crime fiction
from Ireland that is most likely to give us a look at modern (but perhaps skewed?) Dublin life.
Try Little Criminals by Gene Kerrigan or The Wrong Kind of Blood by Declan Hughes as a place to start.
If you are hankering after the Irish countryside,
there are always novels that take us there, such as Yes, My Darling Daughter by Margaret Leroy and Erin Hart's crime novels based on bodies found in Irish peat bogs. Others
have a contemporary twist, like Marsha Mehran's books that tell of Iranian migrants in an archetypal Irish
village.
Recent Irish novels still like to delve into the past
- and Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture and The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty are fine examples. And if you are seeking a
peek at times gone by in Dublin then Brendan O'Carroll's Agnes Brown trilogy that begin in 1960 is a treat....
You'll find a great selection of books set in Ireland
below...time to get started!
If you are visiting us from Europe, please feel free
to visit our UK site.
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