Illustration: Lara Harwood/Heartagency.com

A new Irish literary boom: the post-crash stars of fiction

Dynamic, radical, often female … Irish fiction is flourishing. Gone is the conservative writing – all nostalgia and sexual repression – of the Celtic Tiger years. The writers of the new wave are original and bold

Justine Jordan

Saturday 17 October 2015

“Money kills the imagination,” says the narrator of Claire Kilroy’s 2012 novel The Devil I Know, a fiendishly good satire of the moment the Irish boom went bust. “It makes us want the same thing.” The book is set in 2016 and takes the form of one man’s testimony to a tribunal intended to uncover the sleaze and short-termism that enabled a giant property bubble to inflate in the years leading up to the global financial crash of 2008. In the autumn of 2015, we have not yet caught up with Kilroy’s future setting, but as the real-world aftershocks of the Celtic Tiger’s downfall continue, one Irish sector is booming: with the rise of a new wave of writers, from Paul Murray, Kevin Barry and Donal Ryan to first-time authors such as Eimear McBride, Sara Baume, Lisa McInerney and Colin Barrett, there is a palpable energy to Irish fiction.

 

Donal Ryan

Interview

Donal Ryan: ‘Writing is like being gloriously drunk, and it’s always followed by a hangover of guilt’

Justine Jordan

The award-winning author made headlines when he went back to his day job in the civil service. He talks about seeing ghosts and almost giving up writing

Justine Jordan
Friday 9 March 2018

D

onal Ryan made his name with his debut novel The Spinning Heart, a portrait of recession-hit rural Ireland in 21 voices, which won the Guardian first book award in 2013 and was longlisted for the Man Booker prize. Two other novels and a short story collection quickly followed, set around the same fictional village, a composite of various places in Limerick and Tipperary. Ranging from the boom years of the Celtic Tiger to the experience of Irish Travellers, they dug deep into the psyche of Irish communities, with marginal voices summoning the intensity of small-town loves and hates to uncover a complicated history and uncertain present.

Strange Flowers by Donal Ryan review / A compassionate tale of homecoming

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Strange Flowers by Donal Ryan review – a compassionate tale of homecoming

Five years after she went missing, a woman returns to rural Tipperary in a novel that explores all forms of love

Beejay Silcox
Wed 2 Sep 2020 09.00 BST

W

hen a young woman vanishes from her parents’ home in rural Tipperary it can mean only one of two things: “Moll Gladney was either pregnant or dead, and it was hard to know which one of those was worse.” What other reason could there possibly be for a “good little girl” to forsake the Edenic comforts of these soft green hills? Strange Flowers, Donal Ryan’s sixth novel, opens in the early 1970s, in the wake of Moll’s disappearance: an empty bed, a missing suitcase, a one-way train ticket and a vast and terrible silence. It is a perfect lure of an opening. Perhaps too perfect.

The best books of 2020 / Literary fiction

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

The best books of 2020: Our critics select their picks of the year

Literary fiction

Estelle Birdy

This year's literary fiction offerings blasted a much-needed path to other worlds.

When you hit the last page of Anne Enright's Actress (Jonathan Cape, €19.60) you take a breath and dive straight back in again. Showcasing her mastery of the sentence and her extraordinary emotional intelligence as she explores the relationship between an actress and daughter, it's moving but never sentimental, funny but never pastiche.

In Hamnet, by Maggie O'Farrell (Tinder Press, €19.99), we're transported to Shakespeare's home -although the man himself is never named. The title refers to Shakespeare's ill-fated son who died at the age of 11, but it is Shakespeare's wife, known in the book as Agnes, who takes centre stage in this strangely modern story of life in a plague-worn Warwickshire village. Hamnet won this year's Women's Prize for Fiction.

Sebastian Barry

A Thousand Moons (Faber & Faber, €16.99) sees Sebastian Barry at his powerful, lyrical best. It's an ambitious sequel to the Costa-winning Days Without End but easily read as a standalone piece. Barry (inset)continues his multi-book exploration of the Irish diaspora through generations of the McNulty and Dunne clans. Identity, culture, gender and race are examined sensitively through the eyes of Winona, a Native American girl adopted by the cross-dressing Thomas McNulty and his partner John Cole during the American Indian Wars.

Another sequel, featuring a complicated young woman, Tsitsi Dangerengba's Booker shortlisted This Mournable Body (Faber, €17.99) is a gem. This follow-up to 1988's Nervous Conditions sees the central character Tambu all grown up. Set in 1990s' Harare, this is a powerful, magical novel that considers race and colonialism through Tambu's eyes as she turns her village into an ecotourism location.

There's a universality to Donal Ryan's stories, never more so than in the Eason Novel of the Year, Strange Flowers (Transworld, €11.99). Set in the 1960s in Tipperary, where we meet the Gladney family, whose village is rocked by the disappearance of their daughter and her reappearance some years later, with her unusual family in tow. Ryan's love of people pours from every page.

I needed more sun and more Africa and I got both in Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi's The First Woman (One World, €20.50). Growing up in Idi Amin's Uganda, Kirabo is a young girl searching for her maternal origins. This is a funny, funny book, filled with magic and ancestry. Transported indeed.

Estelle Birdy is a writer and reviewer. Her debut novel, Ravelling, will be published by Lilliput Press in 2021

THE INDEPENDENT