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

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

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

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

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

Alice Kelleher is a young Irish novelist who, after the success of her books and a subsequent breakdown, has retreated to a large, half-empty house on the coast three hours from Dublin. There she meets Felix, a local man who works in a warehouse, and on impulse invites him to travel with her to Rome. Back in the city, her closest friend Eileen, an underpaid literary-magazine editor nursing the wounds of a breakup, drifts back toward Simon, a slightly older man she has known and loved, on and off, since childhood. Across alternating chapters, Rooney follows these four as they circle intimacy, work, faith, and the future, and interleaves the narrative with long, searching emails between Alice and Eileen. In those letters the two women argue about beauty, politics, the collapse of civilization, and whether it is possible to live a good life, and love anyone honestly, in a world that feels as though it is ending. Beautiful World, Where Are You is a quieter, more essayistic novel than Rooney's earlier work, pairing her precise attention to sex and desire with an openly philosophical restlessness. It is a book about millennials trying to figure out what they owe each other and the world, and whether ordinary happiness is enough.

• epistolary

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
• morally grey

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

The sixth Hitchhiker's book, written by Eoin Colfer after Douglas Adams's death. Arthur, Ford, Zaphod, and Trillian are thrown into one more crisis — this time involving a pantheon of unemployed gods — for a lighter final send-off.

Menolly dreams of being a Harper, but her village and family dismiss her musical talents. When her father forbids her passion, she flees her home and finds herself on the planet Pern during a dangerous event called Threadfall. Seeking shelter, she makes a discovery that will change her life forever.

• coming of age

When demons slaughter his family, teenage Grubbs Grady learns a terrifying truth: monsters are real, and his own bloodline carries a curse. To save someone he loves, he's forced into a life-or-death game of chess against Lord Loss, the demon master who destroyed everything he knew.

• survival
• coming of age

Explore the hidden corners of the Shadow Market, a clandestine hub where Downworlders trade magical artifacts and secrets. Brother Zachariah, once the Shadowhunter Jem Carstairs, navigates this world across centuries, searching for a relic from his past and encountering pivotal moments in the lives of other familiar characters. Witness doomed romances, great sins, and a world war unfold against the backdrop of dark dealings and ancient mysteries.

• forbidden love
• coming of age

Cassie Maddox thought she was done with the Dublin Murder Squad, but a new case demands her attention. The victim looks exactly like Cassie and was living under an alias she herself once used. To find the killer, Cassie must step into the dead woman's life and confront the unsettling question of who she truly is.

• secret identity
• fish out of water

Simon Lewis thought his Shadowhunter days were behind him, but a surprising summons to the Shadowhunter Academy changes everything. He's called back to train a new generation of demon hunters, forcing him to confront his past and face unexpected challenges. This collection of short stories explores Simon's journey through lessons, friendships, and the trials of returning to school.

• coming of age

Frank McCourt's childhood in Limerick, Ireland, was a relentless struggle against poverty and hunger. His father's alcoholism and his mother's struggles created a bleak existence, yet Frank found solace in stories and a fierce will to survive. This memoir recounts his difficult upbringing with a remarkable blend of honesty and a surprising capacity for forgiveness.

• coming of age
• survival

'IF THERE WAS EVER A CRUCIAL BOOK FOR OUR CURRENT TIMES, IT'S PAUL LYNCH'S PROPHET SONG... BRILLIANTLY HAUNTING.' OBSERVER The explosive literary sensation: a mother faces a terrible choice as Ireland slides into totalitarianism On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland's newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and when her husband disappears, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a society that is quickly unravelling. How far will she go to save her family? And what - or who - is she willing to leave behind? Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Prophet Song is a work of breathtaking originality, offering a devastating vision of a country at war and a deeply human portrait of a mother's fight to hold her family together. 'A compassionate, propulsive and timely novel that forces the reader to imagine -- what if this was me?' FT

• survival