Irish Books

Chris considers Kala with the help of YA author, creative writing academic and former fiction editor Dr Penni Russon . Walsh's novel has potent ingredients: homecoming, teen nostalgia, the dead girl trope, and a mystery to be solved. There are also supernatural elements. As such, Walsh spins many plates and Chris suggests it's necessary for him to shed some ideas to help Kala move along. Penni and...

Each chapter of Mackey's innovative novel comprises a set of characters delivering monologues in which they confess, complain, and reminisce. Chris and guest Professor Paul Giles of Australian Catholic University consider how Mackey's characters recreate the patterns of earlier generations even when they venture far from their rural origins in Ballyrowan. Some show their true selves in their inner...

Hear in-depth discussions of recent Irish books that are worth reading, across a range of genres. Expert guests get to the heart of books you know and give you ideas of what contemporary Irish literature to read next. Season 2 covers a range of contemporary novels and also branches into short stories and history. Episodes explore established names in fiction such as John Boyne and Jan Carson, but...

Killian Quigley , an expert in oceanic humanities, is Chris's guest to discuss McCann's deep-sea adventure. Writer Anthony Fennell joins a vessel that repairs the information cables that run deep under the ocean, hoping for material for an article. Yet Fennell finds himself especially drawn to his fellow-Irishman, the expedition leader John Conway, both in thrall to and resentful of his corporate...

Maebh Long - Kevin Barry fan and Eamon Cleary Chair of Irish Studies at the University of Otago - joins Chris to discuss The Heart in Winter . Barry's tale of lovers on the run is set in the American midwest in 1891 but looks back to Irish folkloric figures like Deirdre of the Sorrows. As Chris and Maebh discuss, Barry gives us a more agentive figure than the folkloric models in Polly Gillespie, t...

This remarkable novel presents us with a speaker who is reluctant to tell her story. Our young narrator's crisis begins when a republican paramilitary known as the Milkman begins to pay her unwanted attention. Milkman's courtship resembles guerrilla warfare, and his unexplained attraction to Middle Sister befits the directionlessness of the IRA campaign in the late 1970s. Chris and guest Professor...

Kevin Foster , an expert in war narratives at Monash University, helps Chris examine a quirky veteran: the hero of Old God's Time fought in the Malayan Emergency and is a retired Garda. He was also brought up in a Christian Brothers home: protagonist Tom Kettle has been through the wars, so to speak. Tom's past resurfaces when two policemen visit his home in Dalkey about a cold case, little realis...

Chris's guest to discuss Intermezzo is Madeleine Callaghan (Maddy), Senior Lecturer in the School of English at the University of Sheffield. Maddy explains that Rooney's title alludes to the opening strategies of chess, in which players aim to set up the conditions they want for free play. But Rooney's characters find they can't arrange their lives the same way: they can neither identify the begin...

Lucy Collins of University College Dublin explains that Duncan refuses what we expect of a novel. The ideas of visual art matter more here than the plot and character that usually drive fiction. Our focus is on the restorative sculptor John Molloy, and the narrative takes us into his craft. While Chris finds Molloy a frustratingly repressed character, a crisis forces Molloy to confront his past. H...

25 years after the events of Brooklyn , Eilis Lacey has integrated to American life successfully, but faces a crisis in consequence of her husband's infidelity, a crisis that propels her home to Enniscorthy. Guest Matthew Ryan , a specialist in Modern Literature at the Australian Catholic University with an expertise in Tóibín's work, stresses that Eilis is a more assertive character...

Dr Frances Devlin-Glass, Director of the annual James Joyce celebration Bloomsday Melbourne ,  sees Joyce's Modernism at work in McBride's novel. Chris and Frances find McBride having fun with language, the written sentence, and even typesetting at the same time as she explores the complex relations between recovering addict Stephen, his much younger partner Eily, and Stephen's daughter...

Lynch’s Booker-winner is divisive. While Chris Murray wonders whether the characters in Prophet Song could be fleshed out, and the story of a fascist Ireland more fully realised, his guest says that this misses the point. Professor Christopher Morash (Trinity College Dublin) argues that Lynch’s purpose is to explore what happens to a person whose identity is gradually eroded. In a vivi...

In this episode of  Irish Books , historian Professor Dianne Hall joins Chris Murray to discuss Emma Donoghue’s  The Paris Express , a book that brings aspects of the thriller genre to literary fiction. Set aboard a train on a single day in 1895, The Paris Express  assembles a cast of real figures, but in an alternate history in which they are propelled towards disaster. ...

Hear in-depth discussions of recent Irish books that are worth reading, across a range of genres. Expert guests get to the heart of books you know and give you ideas of what contemporary Irish literature to read next. In Irish Books, author and critic Chris Murray discusses recent Irish books with expert guests. Hear their in-depth conversations to learn about contemporary Irish books that are wor...