Four Irish writers on Carnegie longlists
Listen | 10:24
Valentine’s Day love letters: poems to celebrate the love of your life
Dive into this collection of verse that captures the passion of affection
By Martin Doyle
The Naming of the Birds by Paraic O’Donnell: Brilliantly compelling
Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis by Robert D Kaplan - An alarmingly influential book
Land Power: How ownership of the ground beneath our feet can mould our destiny and even embed racial and gendered inequalities
We Do Not Part by Han Kang: Snow becomes a metaphor for the dark underside of modern Korean history
The Boy from the Sea by Garrett Carr: Wry, observant, various and thoughtful, this novel does something only art can
Children’s books dominate Irish library charts with Dog Man topping most-borrowed list
More sex, please: Bridget Jones, Colin Firth and the astonishing rebranding of Jane Austen
Book Club
Sign up to the Irish Times books newsletter for features, podcasts and more
New poetry: The Keelie Hawk, poems written entirely in Scots, will delight and puzzle
By Vona Groarke
Eimear McBride: ‘When my brother died, it was not only losing him but losing all the illusions that you were going to be safe’
By Martin Doyle
The Politics of Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland: A Reader. Harrowing histories that cohere under the north star of liberation
By Adrienne Murphy
Author Rachel Donohue: ‘I needed to write to tell my children something about what I thought of the world’
By Martin Doyle
In Judgement of Others by Eleanor Anstruther: An astonishingly chilly comedy of manners
By Ruby Eastwood
Three Wild Dogs (and the Truth) by Markus Zusak: When the family pets are ‘complete b*stards’ but also ‘beautiful darlings’
By John Boyne
The Grammar of Angels: Propulsive new account of Renaissance controversies about language, knowledge and the occult
By John Gallagher
The SDLP, Politics and Peace: The Mark Durkan Interviews by Graham Spencer – a sharp mind in full flow
By Stephen Walker
The Nazi Mind and The Hohenzollerns and the Nazis: alliance between ‘monsters’ and ‘ordinary people’
By Ian Hughes
‘Conflict, religion and poetry are the three energies that I hold together, and they’re all about language’
By Alex Clark
What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory by Brian Eno, Bette A. Nothing less than a call to arms
By Peter Murphy
The Ghosts of Rome by Joseph O’Connor: Follow-up to My Father’s House draws an extraordinary picture of Rome under Nazi control
By Michael Russell
Documents on Irish Foreign Policy (Vol 14) 1969-73: The North, above all else, required the Department of Foreign Affairs to up its game
By Breandán Mac Suibhne
Michael Longley funeral: Poets and politicians gather for writer who ‘touched the soul and imagination of many’
By Paul Clements
Novelist Emma Healey: ‘There’s an idea that painting all the roofs in the world white would reduce the global temperature’
By Martin Doyle
Joseph O’Connor: ‘I don’t know what modern Ireland is yet. I’m suspicious about the new sacred cows’
Paul Howard and Gordon D’Arcy: ‘Football has rules, but rugby has laws because they were drawn up by solicitors charging by the hour’
By Jen Hogan
‘A lot of things boys seem to instinctually love, we tend to be more dismissive of or even concerned about’
By Edel Coffey
