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.

Books that made me / Eimear McBride / ‘I can never finish Dickens – it’s sacrilege’

 ‘I wouldn’t have minded being Dostoevsky for a while’ … Eimear McBride.

Books

that 

made me

Eimear McBride: ‘I can never finish Dickens – it’s sacrilege’

The author on the novel that made her cry and how Anne of Green Gables taught her an early lesson in the power of the imagination

Eimear McBride
Friday 13 October 2017

The book that had the greatest influence on my writing

Oh, Ulysses. As a writer, once you have read that, you really have to up your game.

The book I think is most underrated

?

The book I am currently reading

Chris Kraus’s After Kathy Acker – I recommend it. When the energy of the writing matches the energy of the subject, it’s magic.

The book that changed my life

Anne of Green Gables. I read it when I was eight and it was the first time I realised what a weapon the imagination could be. I’m not sure that was the point ...

The book I wish I’d written

I can’t imagine having written anyone else’s books but I wouldn’t have minded being Dostoevsky for a while, just to see how it was done.I don’t know about “most” underrated, as it won the Booker prize, but Keri Hulme’s The Bone People is a beautiful novel, looking at difficult subjects in an uncompromisingly complex way, and it’s really owed more of a following than it has.

The last book that made me cry

Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You. It’s a long time since I read a book that made me feel less alone in the world.

The book I couldn’t finish

Any Dickens – sacrilege.

The book I’m most ashamed not to have read

Any Faulkner – the kind of sacrilege I’m bothered by.

The book I most often give as a gift

On balance, I think it’s probably been Susan Faludi’s Backlash. It really helps you get to grips with the media’s war on women and feminism.

The book I’d most like to be remembered for

My multi award-winning, worldwide bestselling, as yet untitled, seventh novel. It’s going to be brilliant.

THE GUARDIAN

THE BOOKS THAT MADE ME
2017

22 September 2017
Books that made me / Franzen / 'I defy anyone to finish it without wetting the pages with tears'
29 September 2017
Philip Pullman / ‘The book I wish I’d written? My next one’

6 October 2017
Anne Enright / ‘I threw The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann into the Liffey in 1983’

13 October 2017

Eimear McBride / ‘I can never finish Dickens – it’s sacrilege’
20 October 2017
Shami Chakrabarti / ‘Harry Potter offers a great metaphor for the war on terror’

1 December 2017
Penelope Lively / My debt to roasted grasshopper with ladybird sauce

2018

20 January 2018
Kamila Shamsie: ‘It took me 17 years to get round to War and Peace’

25 May 2018

Colm Tóibín / ‘I couldn’t read until I was nine / My first book was an Agatha Christie’

8 June 2018
Carol Ann Duffy / ‘I wish I’d written Harry Potter, obvs’

27 July 2018

Richard Powers: ‘I love sci-fi. The more 10-foot reptilians, the better’

28 september 2018
Robin Robertson: ‘The poetry world is polarised. I’m in the middle, vaguely appalled’

2019

18 January 2019
Margaret Drabble / ‘Lee Child does all the things I could never do. I’m awestruck’

1 February 2019
Leïla Sliman / ‘I’ve always been fascinated by Marilyn Monroe'

8 February 2019
Emma Glass / ‘Game of Thrones is overrated. Give me The Lord of the Rings any day'

1 March 2019
Tom Rachman / ‘Does every author read faster than I do?’

8 March 2019
Ben Okri / ‘I began Don Quixote as one person and finished as another’

2020

17 April 2020
Sally Rooney / 'I want the next thing I do to be the best thing I’ve ever done'

1 May 2020
Edna O'Brien / 'Reading Charles Darwin dislodged my religious education'

24 May 2020
André Aciman: 'I couldn’t finish Moby-Dick. I lacked the patience'

9 October 2020
Neil Gaiman / 'Narnia made me want to write, to do that magic trick'

2021

26 March 2021
Vivian Gornick / 'I couldn’t finish Michelle Obama’s Becoming'

9 April 2021
Emma Cline / ‘Reading anything because you “should” doesn’t make sense to me’

6 August 2021

Damon Galgut / ‘After reading Roald Dahl, the world never looked the same’

9 August 2021
Frank Cottrell-Boyce / ‘I read Adrian Mole every year, it gets funnier each time’

13 August 2021
Anuk Arudpragasam / ‘There’s a lot of laughter in my life, but not when I read’

My hero / Eimear McBride on James Joyce

 

James Joyce

My hero:

Eimear McBride on James Joyce

The winner of the first Bailey's women's prize for fiction on how Joyce changed her life

Friday 6 June 2014

J

oyce really set my universe on its end. Reading Ulysses changed everything I thought about language, and everything I understood about what a book could do. I was on a train on the way to a boring temp job when I was about 25; I got on at Tottenham, north London, and opened the first page of Ulysses. When I got off at Liverpool Street in central London, I don't think it is an exaggeration to say the entire course of my life had changed. Although he is viewed as terribly serious and cerebral, so much of the pleasure of reading Joyce is the fun he has and the risks he takes with language; there is nothing quite so enjoyable as the much-maligned Joycean pun.

MY BOOKS OF 2013

It’s not ‘Twelve from the Shelves’ this year as I didn’t read enough books I really loved this year to hit those heights. Or rather: I didn’t read enough that I reviewed. For example, if I’d reviewed them, I would have included:

Olivia Laing’s The Trip to Echo Spring, a gripping report on writers and alcohol (with special attention to Tennessee Williams and John Cheever);

Joe Moran’s Armchair Nation, which recounted the birth and growth of television in the UK with the same spark that he brought to our roads; or

Deborah Levy’s Things I Don’t Want to Know, a powerful essay which combines biography, politics and a response to George Orwell’s Why I Write.

Interesting – perhaps – that those are all non-fiction, where my reviewed choices below are all-but-one fiction. Do I find it easier to review novels? The books below were all read, or re-read, by me this year, and are listed alphabetically by author.

Martin Amis: Money

No surprise that I rate the book which gave me my online identity. This is the book which proved that Amis was not just a writer of short comic novels: he was also a writer of long comic novels. The voice he developed for John Self is a miracle of sustained attention to detail. Money is one of those books where it’s clear the author sweated over every single word. And it was worth it.

J.M. Coetzee: The Childhood of Jesus

I expected this book to be all over the prize shortlists and end-of-year roundups, but it seemed to slip quickly from view after publication early in the year. Perhaps it was the conscious elusiveness of the story, screaming allegory from every page but never quite being nailed down. That was one of the reasons I liked it so much.

Andrew Crumey: The Secret Knowledge

New work from Crumey is always a delight, though he makes us wait – 5 years since Sputnik Caledonia. Once again he has evaded expectations with a novel which is less immediately lighthearted than most of his previous books, but just as provocative, containing parallel worlds, ideas on art and mass culture, and guest appearances from Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno.

William Golding: Pincher Martin

This is a book with an unforgettable twist or two, one in the very last sentence, but which only gains in power when re-read. It is full of strange wonders, not least how so much is packed into so few pages, and how a book so ultimately unknowable can at the same time be as clear as the water its ‘hero’ lives in. If the only Golding you have read is Lord of the Flies, try this.

Stephen Grosz: The Examined Life

One of two debuts on my list, and the only non-fiction title. The conceit is simple: a psychoanalyst tells us the stories of some of his patients. The results are simple and – to me – enormously affecting accounts of what can go wrong, particularly between parents and children, and how it can be possible to begin to put it right.

Chloe Hooper: The Engagement

Another book that I expected to conquer all this year, and which seems to have sunk without trace. Hooper’s second novel is not just a page-turning psychological thriller – though it certainly is that – but also an inquiry into sexuality, male-female relations, and the power of stories. I read it twice and it stood up brilliantly.

J. Robert Lennon: Familiar

Lennon, like Hooper, has the gift of telling stories so seductively that it’s easy to overlook how much he makes you think at the same time. Here we get a story of a woman who finds herself living a new life, everything suddenly and unexplainably changed. Perhaps, as with The Examined Life, it was the acute understanding of parenthood that so floored me here.

Eimear McBride: A Girl is a Half-formed Thing

Much-vaunted by critics and at least one prize jury, McBride’s amazing debut is worthy of all the praise. It is the sort of story you simultaneously want to read and to look away from, and the brittle poetry of the language is a perfect vehicle for the familiarly dark events in this Irish family’s life.

Muriel Spark: The Driver’s Seat

A short Spark shock which, like Pincher Martin, loses none of its impact when you already know its unforgettable ending. A comedy, like much of Spark’s work, but undeniably grim and odd even by her odd standards.

ASYLUM