I was born in Toronto and moved to Ireland as a child, where I spent some formative years in a Khrushchevian-style planned satellite town in southern County Clare. Settlers arrived in waves from Belfast, London, New York or further afield, from cities throughout Chile and South Africa. in this multicultural outpost, populated by residential tourists, we become wry observers of traditional nuances. For me, Ireland’s political, historical and cultural landscapes were first properly discovered in the country’s literature. The greats, like Wilde, Yeats and Joyce, offered cues from the past, while more contemporary writers, including Roddy Doyle, Flann O’Brien and Jamie O’Neill, shed light on lesser-heard Irish voices. That’s why my selection of novels echoes Ireland’s literary journey from before the famine to the present day.
the silent people of walter macken
“famine funerals, then, the wails of women, their shrill screams pierce the sky”
You are reading: Books set in ireland
The second novel in Walter Macken’s sweeping trilogy was published in 1962 and captures the harrowing decades leading up to the famine of 1847. At the beginning of the novel, Dualta Duane’s life takes a turn for the worse after a chance encounter with the son of a landowner. is set in a time when Catholics still bore the scars of the last plague and made a living working on farms while paying exorbitant rents and tithes to corrupt landlords enjoying violent eviction. dualta is the voice of this silent people. the sparkling waters of the atlantic, stone huts carved into the landscape and blue smoke from the lawns keep your spirit alive as you travel south along ireland’s west coast to meet “the liberator” daniel o’connell, before the black 1847 devours the population of the county. a dancer by deirdre purcell
“the day was blue and bright, the beating sun mocking the sea of dark clothes worn by the mourners”
Sometimes death can make a lighthearted appearance, as in the case of Deirdre Purcell’s 1993 novel about repression and isolation. Against the backdrop of the windswept beauty of West Cork’s Beara Peninsula, protagonist Elizabeth Sullivan falls in love with both the ocean-sculpted landscape and the young dancer, Daniel McCarthy. Despite a loveless marriage and an unwanted pregnancy in 1930s Ireland, when most single mothers were sent to cupcake laundries, happiness is discovered in dirty meadows under the shadow of a mountain. The novel was written shortly before we got to see all the horror that the high walls of the Magdalena laundries and industrial schools had been hiding.
angela’s ashes by frank mccourt
“the rain took us to the church, our refuge, our fortress, our only dry place”
See Also: Ellen Crosby – Book Series In Order
the georgian avenues and compact medieval neighborhood of limerick have finally emerged from the cloudy urban landscape of frank mccourt’s poverty-stricken childhood in the 1930s to become a vibrant destination. Published in 1996, this poignant memoir and tribute to his mother, Angela, revealed her bid to survive in tenement conditions on the fringes of Limerick society, earning her a Pulitzer Prize. Unbeknownst to young McCourt, across town, future Hollywood legend Richard Harris and Terry Wogan were growing up in different circumstances, without the backstory of a rainy day of death, near starvation and destitution. Head down O’Connell Avenue to the South Bar and see where Frank’s dad drank his family’s meager earnings.
edna o’brien’s country girls
“at the far edge of the lake there was a belt of cottonwoods that isolated the world”
County Clare author Edna O’Brien’s groundbreaking 1960 novel gave voice to Irish women’s liberation, and the ensuing parochial outrage and censorship of its publication ensured its lasting success. This first book in the trilogy follows the lives of young Cait Brady and Baba Brennan, from their humdrum cloistered life in County Limerick to the bright lights of Dublin. Climbing the pages were older men, like Mr. Knight Predator, who used the country girls’ emancipation wager to exploit his vulnerability. the book angered the country’s power houses at the time, church and state, who struggled to grasp the concept that women may want more out of life than domestic servitude.
brooklyn by colm tóibín
“there was a vague mist that masked the line between the horizon and the sky”
colm tóibin’s costa award-winning novel, published in 2009, is the story of the immigrant, transformed by the loneliness and freedom of her journey. Eilis Lacey returns to Ireland in the 1950s and her married life in New York darkens in a mist across the ocean. She adjusts to the old familiar rhythm of life in County Wexford and begins to see handsome Jim Farrell with new eyes. However, Brooklyn eventually finds her in the cozy cocoon of the Irish coast and has to make a difficult choice between her two different worlds of hers.
anne enright’s green path
“it was already getting dark, although the afterglow lingered over the western Atlantic; a sky too big for the sun to go down”
man booker award winner anne enright places her softly written novel at the extreme end of ireland’s celtic tiger economy. rosaleen madigan is stepping into her twilight years at her farm alongside an old (green) famine road in the ocean-fringed limestone landscape of burren park in county clare. Rosaleen’s four children return for one last Christmas together, and the intricate backstories of their scarred lives unfold in the first half of this 2015 novel. Hanna is an alcoholic in Dublin, Dan lives with his boyfriend in Toronto. , emmet wanders around mali and constance stays close to home. Personalities collide during Christmas, before Rosaleen wanders into the dark to escape the drama.
eureka street by robert mcliam wilson
“the color of the streets always seemed drained and dull, as if the colors had also been blown away by the wind”
See Also: 3 Must-Read Real Estate Books About Marketing – HomeSpotter Blog
Two stories from the same city told vividly by unlikely working-class friends: one a tough-looking Catholic, the other a Protestant capitalist. The Belfast setting for this novel, published in 1996, covers the months before and after the 1994 IRA ceasefire. The often humorous version of the slowly receding shadow of trouble graphically depicts the violence of a fractured belfast, while the protagonists try to normalize their lives in the midst of chaos and prejudice. one chapter lulls the reader into a smooth, harmonious vision of the city and is followed by another, which blows up the scene with the bombing of a sandwich shop. The tangled lives of the two friends are told in fast-paced prose and peppered with satire, a foreshadowing of the author’s future role in Charlie Hebdo.
donal ryan’s spinning heart
“the things you were sure you would have in the future turn out to be on the other side of a big, dark mountain”
donal ryan tells a booker’s award shortlisted story set in the lush countryside of tipperary, a place where menacing hillsides and wide lakes block escape routes to mental and physical freedom. mourning mother bridie sits with her back to the river shannon to block off neighboring county clare, where her son died, while vasya admits she will drown if she tries to swim across loch derg. They are just two of the 21 desolate voices left behind by circumstance in his novel, published in 2012. It is set at a time when Ireland was haunted by ghost properties and zombie hotels while reckless bank lending destroyed the Irish economy and ordinary people fell into disrepair. forced to rebuild their lives. from the butcher shop.
normal people by sally rooney
“dublin is extraordinarily beautiful to her when it rains, the way gray stone turns black”
Published in 2018 and shortlisted for a booker award in the same year, sally rooney’s story of fractured hearts and minds traverses the class structure and ireland from the west coast to dublin, appearing on the top 19 list barack obama’s top picks for 2019. traces the fragile relationship between a popular high school student, connell, and outcast marianne, through their change of fortune when she becomes the cool girl at dublin’s trinity university and he loses his way in the grandeur of life there. The small-screen production of the book dominated ratings and press coverage during the COVID-19 lockdown, as did Connell’s shorts, necklace and prolonged nudity. On screen, Tobercurry and Streedagh Strand in Sligo played the fictional town of Carricklea from the novel.
the sea by john banville
“from now on I would have to approach things as they are, not as I imagine them, because this was a new version of reality”
John Banville’s 2005 Man Booker Award-winning novel depicts art historian Max Morden as a man at sea, trying to make his way through the turbulence of loss and grief. He returns to County Wexford, where he spent summer vacations as a child. you can almost taste the salty air and feel the gentle breeze burn against tender skin as the prose bobs back and forth between past and present in this timeless, brooding, and haunting masterpiece.
See Also: 30 of the Best Middle School and Middle Grade Books for Tweens and Kids