Books from Ireland

When the painter Basil Hallward completes a portrait of the beautiful young Dorian Gray, Dorian makes an idle, despairing wish: that the picture might age in his place, and that he could stay forever as young and lovely as the day it was painted. His wish is granted. As Dorian, encouraged by the cynical, epigram-spouting Lord Henry Wotton, gives himself over to a life of pleasure, cruelty, and corruption, his face remains untouched — while the portrait, hidden away, grows monstrous with every sin. Oscar Wilde's only novel is a dark fable of aestheticism, vanity, and moral consequence, as sharp in its wit as it is unsettling in its horror. Around Dorian's unchanging beauty, Wilde builds a Faustian parable about the cost of a life lived purely for sensation, and a portrait of Victorian society's obsession with surface and youth. First published in 1890 and expanded the following year, the book scandalised its first readers and remains one of the most enduring works of Gothic and philosophical fiction in English.

Connell and Marianne grow up in the same small town in County Sligo — he is popular and she is not, and his mother cleans her family's house. Over four years, through Trinity College Dublin and back again, they keep circling each other, drawn together and pulled apart by class, silence and the difficulty of saying plainly what they want.

• coming of age
• multiple povs

Shy, bullied Shannon Lynch transfers to Tommen College hiding bruises from her father — and is noticed by rugby prodigy Johnny Kavanagh. Book one of Chloe Walsh's Boys of Tommen: a 600-page slow-burn Irish sports romance about abuse, safety and found family.

• slow burn
• friends to lovers
• found family
• multiple povs

A young solicitor travels to Transylvania on ordinary business and discovers his client is no ordinary nobleman. When the count relocates to England, a small circle of friends led by the physician Van Helsing must piece together the truth from letters, diaries, and telegrams before it is too late. Bram Stoker's 1897 epistolary novel that defined the modern vampire.

• epistolary

In a remote castle in the forests of Styria, the lonely young Laura takes in a beautiful, secretive guest named Carmilla — and finds herself both captivated by and afraid of her intense affection. As Carmilla's presence grows, women in the countryside sicken and die, and Laura falls mysteriously ill. Sheridan Le Fanu's 1872 Gothic novella predates Dracula and helped define vampire fiction.

• forbidden love

Four evacuee siblings step through an old wardrobe into Narnia, a land of talking beasts held in endless winter by the White Witch. Guided by the great lion Aslan, they're drawn into a fight for Narnia's freedom that costs one of them a terrible betrayal — and Aslan an even greater price.

• portal fantasy
• sacrifice
• betrayal
• redemption arc

Rugby prodigy Johnny Kavanagh and anxious, traumatized Shannon Lynch fight to hold on to the fragile safety they've found together, as an injury threatens Johnny's future and Shannon's dangerous home life closes in. The emotional, slow-burn second novel in Chloe Walsh's Boys of Tommen series.

• slow burn

Nine-year-old Bruno, son of a Nazi commandant, is uprooted from Berlin to a bleak house beside a place he calls "Out-With." Following a wire fence, he befriends Shmuel, a boy on the other side, never grasping what the fence means. John Boyne's spare, fable-like Holocaust novel told through a child's uncomprehending eyes.

In 1596, in a narrow house in Stratford-upon-Avon, an eleven-year-old boy falls ill. His father is away in London; his mother, a healer and keeper of bees named Agnes, is not at home when the fever takes hold. Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet reimagines the short life and death of William Shakespeare's only son — an event that has left barely a trace in the historical record — and the family shattered in its wake. Moving between two timelines, the novel follows the unlikely courtship of Agnes and the young Latin tutor who will become the most famous writer in the English language, and, years later, the days surrounding their son's death from plague. O'Farrell never names Shakespeare, keeping her gaze fixed on the household he left behind: his wife, his daughters, and the boy whose name would echo, a few years later, in the title of a tragedy. Winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction, Hamnet is a luminous, deeply felt meditation on marriage, grief, and the way loss transmutes into art.

• dual timeline

A young boy and his schoolmate discover a magical wood between worlds that connects countless parallel universes. Their accidental voyage leads them through time itself, where they witness the creation of Narnia by Aslan and inadvertently set in motion events that will shape its history for centuries to come.

• portal fantasy
• coming of age

Frances is a twenty-one-year-old student and aspiring writer in Dublin, cool, observant, and guarded. She performs spoken-word poetry with her charismatic ex-girlfriend and closest friend, Bobbi, with whom she remains intensely, complicatedly bound. When the pair are taken up by Melissa, an older, established photographer and essayist, Frances is drawn into the orbit of Melissa's handsome, reserved actor husband, Nick. What begins as banter curdles into an affair, and Frances, who prides herself on ironic detachment, finds her carefully managed self-image coming apart. As she navigates desire, jealousy, money, and a body that keeps failing her, she has to reckon with how little her theories about love and independence protect her from actually feeling. The novel unfolds in Frances's precise, deadpan first person, alive to every power shift in a conversation. Sally Rooney's debut, Conversations with Friends, announced one of contemporary fiction's most distinctive voices. It is a sharp, unsettling study of friendship, infidelity, and self-invention among young people who talk brilliantly and understand themselves only partway.

• coming of age
• forbidden love

Two Victorian gentlemen each invent a fictitious person to escape their obligations — and both end up courting under the same borrowed name, "Ernest." Oscar Wilde's farcical masterpiece of mistaken identity, mercenary marriage and immaculate epigram.

• secret identity

Artemis Fowl, a brilliant but amoral teenager, plans to restore his family's fortune by kidnapping a fairy. He soon discovers that the fairies are not the delicate creatures of myth, but a technologically advanced civilization with a formidable army. This sets the stage for a high-stakes conflict between the human world and the magical underworld.

• morally grey
• heist

On a bare country road, two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, wait for a mysterious figure named Godot, who never comes. They bicker, reminisce, and consider giving up, joined by the tyrannical Pozzo and his servant Lucky. Samuel Beckett's 'tragicomedy in two acts' is the founding masterpiece of the Theatre of the Absurd — bleakly funny and endlessly interpreted.

Calen Bryer is grieving his brother and facing a three-night trial in the forest with only a knife and a bow. Then three strangers bring a deadly secret to Milltown, and he is dragged into an empire war with no prophecy to guide him.

• chosen one
• quest
• reluctant hero
• coming of age

Grieving over the murder of his family, private detective Charlie "Bird" Parker returns to Maine in search of refuge, and becomes caught up in the murders of a young mother and her child, a crime that could be linked to the troubled history of Parker's own grandfather.

• dual timeline
• mystery box
• reluctant hero

A grieving ex-detective turned private investigator hunts the serial killer he believes murdered his wife and daughter, in the book that launched John Connolly's Charlie Parker series.

• morally grey
• unreliable narrator
• revenge

From the author of Hamnet, a vivid reimagining of Lucrezia de' Medici, married at fifteen to the Duke of Ferrara and dead within a year amid rumors of poisoning. Braiding her Florentine girlhood with the tense final months in her husband's remote fortress, Maggie O'Farrell renders a spirited young artist fighting for her life inside a gilded cage.

• dual timeline
• court intrigue

After her husband Gerry dies of a brain tumor, Holly Kennedy withdraws from her family and friends in Dublin. Then a package arrives with letters Gerry wrote before his death, one for each month ahead, each signed "P.S. I Love You."

• epistolary

Cyril Avery's life is told across decades of Irish history, from the aftermath of World War II through the Troubles and into a changing modern Ireland. The novel follows him as he navigates his identity, loss, and love in an era when homosexuality was criminalized — until it wasn't. Told partly in first person and partly in third, Boyne weaves together multiple timelines to show how one man's story is shaped by the prejudices of the past and the hope of a changing future.

• coming of age
• family saga
• found family

Twenty years ago, Rob Ryan was the only survivor of a trio of children who vanished into the woods. He returned with no memory of the event, only the trauma. Now a detective, a new murder in the same woods forces him to confront his buried past. He and his partner must solve the current crime, hoping it will finally reveal what happened to him all those years ago.

• reluctant hero
• dual timeline
• unreliable narrator

Fifteen stories of Dublin life at the turn of the twentieth century, published in 1914 after nearly a decade of refusals. Joyce ordered them to run from childhood through adolescence and maturity to public life, closing with "The Dead". Almost nothing is resolved; each story turns instead on a sudden, unwanted clarity that arrives too late to be any use.

• multiple povs
• coming of age

Lessa has lived years in hiding, serving as a kitchen girl to those who wronged her family. Now, she's ready to reclaim her birthright and her life takes a dramatic turn when she bonds with a queen dragon. As an ancient threat descends, Lessa and her dragon must fight to protect their world, for few dragon riders remain.

• chosen one
• revenge
• survival
• secret identity

Darren faces his ultimate enemy, Steve Leopard, in a battle that could decide the fate of the world. With destiny demanding one of them become the Lord of the Shadows, Darren must find a way to outwit fate and prevent global destruction. This thrilling installment plunges readers into a dark world where friendship and sacrifice are tested.

• chosen one
• rivals
• coming of age

James Joyce's Ulysses chronicles a single day, June 16, 1904, in Dublin. Follow the ordinary yet extraordinary lives of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus as they navigate the city's streets. This landmark novel offers a deep dive into the human condition, blending the mundane with the profound.

• multiple povs

Wren Greenrock has always known that one day she would steal her sister's place in the palace. Trained from birth to return to the place of her parents' murder and usurp the only survivor, she will do anything to rise to power and protect the community of witches she loves. Or she would, if only a certain palace guard wasn't quite so distractingly attractive, and if her reckless magic didn't have a habit of causing trouble... Princess Rose Valhart knows that with power comes responsibility. Marriage into a brutal kingdom awaits, and she will not let a small matter like waking up in the middle of the desert in the company of an extremely impertinent (and handsome) kidnapper get in the way of her royal duty. But life outside the palace walls is wilder and more beautiful than she ever imagined, and the witches she has long feared might turn out to be the family she never knew she was missing. Two sisters separated at birth and raised into entirely different worlds are about to get to know each other's lives a whole lot better. But as coronation day looms closer and they each strive to claim their birthright, the sinister Kingsbreath, Willem Rathborne, becomes increasingly determined that neither will succeed. Who will ultimately rise to power and wear the crown?

• secret identity
• multiple povs

Rosie Dunne and Alex Stewart have been best friends since childhood, and maybe always meant to be more, but one misunderstanding and an ocean between them turn their love story into a decades-long comedy of missed timing. Told entirely through their letters, emails, and notes, Cecelia Ahern's epistolary romance (also published as Where Rainbows End) is warm, funny, and bittersweet.

• friends to lovers
• epistolary
• slow burn

Four hundred years before Calen Bryer ever lifted a sword, the city of Ilnaen burned. The Order has stood as the guardians of the mortal realm since Epheria's earliest days, sworn to oaths older than any living kingdom — but on the night a red moon rises, those oaths break. Dragons turn on each other in a burning sky. Brothers and sisters of the Order turn on each other in the streets below. And in the chaos, the gods reach their hands into the world for the first time in an age. Alvira, Archon of the Draleid, Eltoar, Kallinvar, Brother Captain of the Second, and Coren stand at the center of the night that ends the Order as Ilnaen has always known it.

• betrayal
• multiple povs

After traveling with Mr. Crepsley, the vampire who made him into a half-vampire, Darren returns to the freak show known as the Cirque du Freak and continues to fight his need to drink human blood.

Artemis Fowl II finally learns his father is alive, held by the Russian Mafia. To free him, the young criminal mastermind must team up with the fairies he once kidnapped and stop a goblin uprising backed by a rogue ex-officer.

• quest
• morally grey