Author Picks: 8 Novels That Prove the Irish Are Genius Storytellers

Divorced mom Elizabeth Keane returns to her childhood home in Ireland following her mother’s death, keen to neatly wrap up the loose ends and jet back home to New York. Instead, she happens upon a trove of letters and begins uncovering family secrets, past and present, in this charming gem of a domestic mystery. Norton deftly ratchets up the tension as the story unfolds, adding plenty of twists to this engrossing page-turner.

Marianne is brilliant, wealthy, and isolated; Connell, whose mother cleans Marianne’s house, is an exceptional student and a gifted, popular athlete. This is a story of first love—fraught, yearning, complicated. In language pared down to the bone, Sally Rooney’s NORMAL PEOPLE follows the ebbs and flows of the lovers as they meet up at Trinity College in Dublin and as the dynamics between them—economic, sexual, emotional—shift and shift again.

The ultimate cozy comfort read, CIRCLE OF FRIENDS stars small-town besties Benny and Eve, who dream of ditching conservative, rural 1950s Ireland for Dublin City. Once they arrive, their circle of friends widens to include the charming Jack Foley and beautiful, icy Nan, among others, in a great gossipy story told with heart and keen insight about the nature of friendship.

It’s no mean feat trying to choose the most gripping Tana French novel, but her first, IN THE WOODS, part of the Dublin Murder Squad series, still packs a massive and ominous punch. When the body of a little girl is found in a forest, the detective who must solve it has his own mystery to unravel; twenty-two years prior, he himself stumbled, dazed and bleeding, from those very same woods, though his two pals, who went missing that day, weren’t so lucky.

Reading Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown Trilogy, composed of his first three novels—THE COMMITMENTS, THE SNAPPER, and THE VAN—you may as well be sitting, eavesdropping, in a pub on Dublin’s Northside. Set in the fictional working-class enclave of Barrytown and crackling with witty dialogue at breakneck speed, this series stars the well-meaning and funny patriarch Jimmy Rabbitte and his family and friends as they set about on all sorts of larks, from Junior starting a blues band to the unemployed Jimmy opening a chippie van with his sidekick Bimbo.

McCann’s haunting tour de force, a sweeping, sprawling, ambitious, heartbreaking story, begins in 1974 New York City, when tightrope walker Philip Petit first steps onto a wire between the Twin Towers. Far below him, meanwhile, the lives of a handful of fragmented city dwellers intersect and collide in devastating fashion—a prostitute and her daughter, a judge, a grieving upper-class mother, a nurse, and, most central, two brothers from Ireland.

Set in a village described as “the arse-end of beyond,” HIMSELF is a bold and magical mystery, a wildly imaginative supernatural crime fiction debut—and darkly funny to boot. Our orphaned hero, Mahony, returns to the village of Mulderrig in the south of Ireland to discover what really happened to his dead mother there decades earlier, but the cast of eccentric villagers (and its garrulous ghosts) have their own agenda.

“The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died.” This is the first outrageous, brilliant, disturbing sentence in an unforgettable book teeming with them. Our young nameless narrator, stalked by the milkman, who is not, in fact, a milkman but a dangerous dissident, must navigate a taut, perilous life in the fraught world of 1970s warring Belfast. (This one’s something of a cheat since Burns is from Northern Ireland, but it’s too good to leave out.)

Rebecca Hardiman's debut novel GOOD EGGS is out now!

When Kevin Gogarty’s irrepressible eighty-three-year-old mother, Millie, is caught shoplifting yet again, he has no choice but to hire a caretaker to keep an eye on her. Kevin, recently unemployed, is already at his wits’ end tending to a full house while his wife travels to exotic locales for work, leaving him solo with his sulky, misbehaved teenaged daughter, Aideen, whose troubles escalate when she befriends the campus rebel at her new boarding school.

Into the Gogarty fray steps Sylvia, Millie’s upbeat home aide, who appears at first to be their saving grace—until she catapults the Gogarty clan into their greatest crisis yet.

With charm, humor, and pathos to spare, GOOD EGGS is a delightful study in self-determination; the notion that it’s never too late to start living; and the unique redemption that family, despite its maddening flaws, can offer.