Irish fiction

The returns of two of Irish fiction’s best-loved female characters are among the literary highlights of 2024.

The Women Behind the Door (Jonathan Cape, September) sees the return of Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle’s Paula Spencer, who first appeared in The Woman Who Walked into Doors (1996) and the eponymous Paula Spencer (2006). Paula is now in her 60s, having forged a life that allows her to escape the past and finally enjoy the present. That is until her eldest daughter, Nicola, turns up on her doorstep.

Long Island (Picador, May) is the sequel to Colm Tóibín’s prize-winning, best-selling novel Brooklyn. Eilis Lacey, now Fiorello, has built a secure, happy life with her husband Tony since leaving Brooklyn – perhaps a little stifled by the in-laws so close, but 20 years married and with two children looking towards a good future. Then a man with an Irish accent knocks on her door and everything changes.

The Hunter (Penguin, March) by Tana French is a sequel to The Searcher, featuring Cal Hooper as a former US detective finding his peace in a small Irish town disturbed when his lover Lena’s ex-partner returns with plans to deceive old friends and reclaim his daughter Trey, whose mother is Lena.

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[ Tana French: ‘It’s all Stephen King’s fault’ ]

Kevin Barry’s first novel set in America, The Heart in Winter (Canongate, July), is said to be a savagely funny and achingly romantic tale of young lovers on the lam in 1890s Montana. Butte, Montana is rich on copper mines and rampant with vice and debauchery among a hard-living crowd of immigrant Irish workers. Tom Rourke, a young poet, ballad-maker and a fearsome degenerate, falls for Polly Gillespie, bride of the extremely devout mine captain Long Anthony Harrington. All hell breaks loose.

Wild Houses (Penguin, January) is the long-awaited first novel by Colin Barrett after two acclaimed story collections (Young Skins, Homesickness). The story of a small-town kidnapping, at its heart is the tale of two outsiders forced to find and save themselves on the craziest weekend of their lives.

In Breakdown (W&N, January) by Cathy Sweeney, an ordinary, middle-class Dubliner walks out on her husband and children, ending up in Wales where she faces up to what she has been ignoring inside herself, her family, modern society: signs of breakdown.

Ghost Mountain (Bluemoose, May) is Rónán Hession’s follow-up to the hugely successful Leonard & Hungry Paul and Panenka. It is a simple fable-like novel about a mountain that appears suddenly, and the way in which its manifestation ripples through the lives of characters in the surrounding community.

[ Rónán Hession: ‘I’m okay with writing books that fit into my life’ ]

The Alternatives (Oneworld, April) by Caoilinn Hughes follows three sisters returning home to Ireland in a desperate search for their missing eldest sibling, confronting old wounds and a desperately uncertain future. From the Encore Award winning author of The Wild Laughter and Orchid & the Wasp.

Delving into the lives of three generations of women, The Amendments (Picador, April) by Niamh Mulvey is a novel about love and freedom, belonging and rebellion. Nell and her partner Adrienne are about to have a baby. But Nell has been a mother before. The Amendments takes us to the heat of Nell’s teenage years in the early 2000s and to 1983, when Nell’s mother Dolores was grappling with tensions in the women’s rights movement.

Our London Lives (Atlantic, May) by Christine Dwyer Hickey is an epic literary novel about two Irish characters over 40 years in London. It is the author’s follow-up to The Narrow Land, which won the 2020 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction and the Dalkey Literary Award.

Lucy Caldwell also returns after a Walter Scott Prize winning novel, These Days, with a new story collection, Openings (Faber, May).

Quickly, While They Still Have Horses (Penguin, April) is a new collection of 16 short stories by Jan Carson following two acclaimed novels, The Raptures and The Firestarters.

My Favourite Mistake (Penguin, May) by Marian Keyes finds Anna Walsh back home with her parents in Dublin aged 48 after her glamorous life in New York fell apart. An old flame and a new job offer a fresh start.

[ ‘The people we fall in love with are as incomplete as we are’: Marian Keyes shares six life lessons on turning 60 ]

Jaq: A Top Boy Story (Canongate, January) marks a welcome return to fiction by Ronan Bennett, author of such acclaimed works as The Catastrophist and Havoc, in its Third Year. It develops the story of one of the most compelling characters in his hit Netflix series about a London drugs gang.

In Barcelona (Canongate, March) by Mary Costello, her first story collection since the exquisite The China Factory, we meet a cast of characters who live turbulent inner lives. In a Spanish hotel room a marriage unravels as a young wife is haunted by a past love. A woman attends a reading by a famous author and comes to some painful realisations about her own marriage.

This Is How You Remember It (Canongate, May) by Catherine Prasifka (None of This Ibs Serious) is about the perils of growing up online, at once a cautionary tale, a call to arms and a tender love story.

In Her Place (Sphere, March) is Edel Coffey’s follow-up to her hit debut novel Breaking Point. Ann falls for Justin, whose wife Deborah is terminally ill. She moves in with him and his little girl, Sophie. But just as Ann finds that she is pregnant, Justin receives news. Unexpectedly, his wife’s drug trial has been a success. Deborah is coming home.

Reality Check (Penguin, April) by former glossy magazine editor Vicki Notaro is described as Real Housewives meets Jilly Cooper, a peek behind the scenes of celebrity culture.

Earth (Penguin, May) is the second of John Boyne’s four linked novellas. Evan Keogh leaves his Irish island home, finding work as a male escort before becoming a professional footballer then implicated in a sexual assault trial.

Hitched (Macmillan, February) by JF Murray is the laugh-out-loud romcom of the year, according to his publisher, Bridesmaids meets The Hangover.

Cross (Granta, July) by Austin Duffy is set in the eponymous Irish Border town where an informer is suspected of sabotaging IRA operations in the dying days of the Troubles.

Monaghan (Unbound, November) is Timothy O’Grady’s first new novel in 15 years; it follows last year’s reissue of I Could Read the Sky. It too is a collaboration with a visual artist, the painter Anthony Lott. It is a story of love and making art and the way memories of killing haunt the mind.

In Seaborne (New Island, April), by Nuala O’Connor, Anne Bonny’s exhilarating journey towards a fleeting pirate career is reimagined by one of Ireland’s finest writers as uncompromising, queer, neurodivergent, brave and passionate.

In Hey, Zoey (Bloomsbury, May) by Sarah Crossan, when a wife discovers an animatronic sex doll hidden in the garage, the husband moves out and the doll moves in. And in Where the Heart Should Be (Bloomsbury YA, March) the Carnegie Medal-winning former Laureate na nÓg explores love and family during the Great Hunger.

After a Dance (Picador, February) is a compiled collection of short stories from acclaimed writer Bridget O’Connor, with an exclusive preface from the author’s daughter, Constance Straughan. One of the great short-story writers of her generation, she had a voice that was viscerally funny and an eye for both the glaring reality and the absurdity of the everyday.

Way Out West (New Island, March) by Anthony Glavin is a gentle, evocative coming-of-age novel. In the last gasps of the American dream, a young Irishman quests for beauty, freedom and connection.

Your Own Dark Shadow (Tramp Press, November), edited and introduced by Jack Fennell, showcases lesser-known works of classic Irish horror, including stories by William Carleton, Henry de Vere Stacpoole and Mildred Darby.

Cork Stories (Doire Press, March) edited by Madeleine D’Arcy and Laura McKenna promises short stories set in Cork city and county by writers who live, or who have lived, in Cork, including Kevin Barry, Danny Denton, Martina Evans, Danielle McLaughlin, Jamie O’Connell, Mary Morrissy and William Wall.

In Whatever Happened to Birdie Troy (Hachette Ireland, February) by Rachael English, the podcast host Stacey Nash becomes fascinated with The Diamonds, Ireland’s trailblazing all-woman rock band, which broke up before she was born.

The Honeymon Affair (Review, April) by Sheila O’Flanagan stars two strong women, one complicated man, and the secrets and dreams that draw them together.

Marie-Louise Fitzpatrick’s Sisters of the Moon (Faber, August), from the Carnegie-shortlisted author of On Midnight Beach, is an atmospheric YA about ethereal power, the unexplainable and growing up in a small Irish town.

Debuts

Glorious Exploits (Fig Tree, January) by Ferdia Lennon is a true original and hotly tipped, the Bookseller’s book of the month. It’s 412 BC, and Athens’s invasion of Sicily has failed catastrophically. Thousands of Athenians are held captive in the quarries of Syracuse, starving and dejected. But they will recite lines from the plays of Euripides for food. Lampo and Gelon, local potters with barely two obols to rub together but a love for drama, decide to put on Medea in the quarry. Because, after all, you can hate the Athenians for invading your territory but still love their poetry.

Hagstone (Fourth Estate, April) is the fiction debut of Sinéad Gleeson, author of the acclaimed essay collection Constellations and editor of anthologies of Irish women’s fiction. Artist Nell shares a remote island with the mysterious Inions, a commune of women who have travelled there from all over the world, considering it a place of refuge and of solace in nature.

Set in rural Donegal in 1994, The Coast Road (Bloomsbury, May) by Alan Murrin is the story of Colette, a bohemian writer who returns home having left her husband and children to pursue an affair in Dublin.

In Paper Dragons: The Fight for the Hidden Realm (Hodder Children’s, February), by Siobhan McDermott, 12-year-old Zhi Ging has always been an outcast until she receives an invitation to Hok Woh, an underwater school that offers her the chance to become immortal, and to finally belong.

Ravelling (Lilliput, May), the debut novel by Estelle Birdy, set in Dublin’s Liberties, channels the energies and agonies of young men let loose in the city, navigating between drug dealers, the Garda and close-knit family networks.

Evenings and Weekends (4th Estate, May), by the acclaimed spoken-word artist Oisín McKenna, is set over one long hot weekend in London in 2019. Maggie is pregnant, but her partner, Ed, shares a secret with her best friend, Phil, whose mother, Rosaleen, is visiting with news of her own.

Habitat by Catriona Shine (Lilliput Press, March), a striking debut, follows seven people over a week in an increasingly strange situation: their mid-century apartment building in Oslo begins to inexplicably disappear.

Gub (Corsair, February), the debut poetry collection by Scott McKendry, comes with the buzz that normally accompanies a hot first novel. Rooted in the language of working-class Belfast, it tackles generational trauma, social decay and the rituals of a place with a fraught history and an uncertain future.

Bodies (John Murray, June) by Christine Anne Foley invites us to think about the way a woman operates in a society where her body feels owned by others as much as it is by herself. It’s a story about sex, death, growing up and making choices about who and how you love.

In Exile (John Murray, May), by Aimee Walsh, young student Fiadh’s life is turned upside down while on a night out in Belfast. Her nights revolve around random hookups fuelled by drink and drugs.

Night Swimmers (Serpent’s Tail, February) by Roisin Maguire is “a funny, moving family story with an unconventional heroine in a quirky coastal community”. Think Olive Kitteridge or The Shipping News on the Irish Sea.

Maggie Armstrong’s Old Romantics (Tramp Press, April) is “a collection of alternative romances told from a netherworld of love and disenchantment”. Slippery, observant and flawed, Armstrong’s narrators navigate a world of awkward expectation and latent hostility.

Spirit Level (Eriu, April) by Richy Craven features Danny Hook, a directionless twentysomething fresh out of therapy. He’s sure things couldn’t get much worse, until a drink-driving accident leaves his best friend Nudge dead and Danny hospitalised.

Sparks of Bright Matter (Eriu, April) by Leanne O’Donnell, set in Georgian London, features a young Irish apprentice chemist with an interest in alchemy who is tasked with caring for a mysterious illustrated book but loses it to a prostitute. Soon, dangerous men are in pursuit.

Girl in the Making (Sandycove, March) by Anna Fitzgerald is the story of a gentle girl growing up in a brutally hypocritical suburban Dublin in the 1970s and 1980s. Mouthing (Penguin, May) by Orla Mackey is a bittersweet love letter to small-town Irish life over several generations, a polyvocal mosaic of many narratives in the vein of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge.

[ ‘She just showed up’: Elizabeth Strout on the return of Olive Kitteridge ]

Where They Lie (Simon & Schuster, February) by Claire Coughlan is as much a murder-mystery story as a look at a young woman’s struggle to succeed in a man’s world.

The Grateful Water (New Island, May) by Juliana Adelman is from a debut fiction author steeped in the history of Dublin, a detective story that swelters and smells of the oppressively hot summer of 1866.

Crime

Pitched as Normal People with murders, Emma, Disappeared (Hachette, March) by Andrew Hughes is a modern psychological crime novel set in Dublin. After his tweet about a missing entrepreneur goes viral, archivist James Lyster begins a relationship with a Trinity student – a fellow volunteer in the search for the missing woman – and draws the suspicion of a police detective.

John Banville’s The Drowned (Faber, October), his latest Strafford and Quirke mystery, is set in 1950s rural Ireland. A loner comes across a mysteriously empty car in a field. He is soon embroiled in a missing-persons case.

A Stranger in the Family (HarperFiction, March), by Jane Casey, is the latest DS Maeve Kerrigan and DI Josh Derwent thriller. A couple’s bodies are found 16 years after their child disappeared. An apparent murder-suicide but all is not as it seems.

The Favourite (Orion, January) by Rosemary Hennigan is a razor-sharp suspense novel about power and identity that asks the question: what do you do when there is a vast difference between what is right and what is legal?

In The Trial (Quercus, June) by Jo Spain, Dani returns as a history professor to the college where her boyfriend disappeared when they were students a decade before.

[ Jo Spain: ‘It wasn’t a peaceful childhood. I saw a lot of drugs and crime’ ]

In The Offer (Hodder & Stoughton, June) by RB Egan, a married woman receives an email telling her €1 million has been put in her bank account. All she needs to do is drive a car. And so starts a deadly chain of events.

The Instruments of Darkness (Hodder & Stoughton, May) by John Connolly is his latest Charlie Parker thriller. In Maine, Colleen Clark stands accused of the abduction and possible murder of her child.

International fiction

James (Picador, April) by Percival Everett, the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Trees, forces us to see Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in a wholly new and transformative light, through the eyes of the enslaved Jim, defying the conventions that have consigned him to the margins.

Godwin (4th Estate, June) by Joseph O’Neill is the odyssey of two brothers crossing the world in search of an African soccer prodigy who might change their fortunes. The publisher claims it is on the scale of O’Neill’s brilliant, similarly sport-themed Pen/Faulkner Award-winning Netherland, investigating the legacy of colonialism in the context of family love, global capitalism and the dreaming individual.

My Heavenly Favourite (Picador, February) by Lucas Rijneveld/tr Michele Hutchison is the new novel from the winners of the International Booker Prize. A 14-year-old farmer’s daughter makes friends with the local vet. Their obsessive reliance on each other’s stories builds into a terrifying trap, with a confession at the heart of it that threatens to rip their small community apart.

Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road (Picador, April) is a state-of-the-nation novel, the story of one man’s epic fall from grace from the award-winning author of Mayflies. André Aciman’s The Gentleman from Peru (Faber, April) is a sun-baked Italian summer story from the best-selling author of Call Me by Your Name. Atmospheric and sensual, the novel explores regret, fate and romance.

You Are Here (Sphere, April) by David Nicholls is a love story. Marnie is stuck. Michael is coming undone. When a persistent mutual friend and some very English weather conspire to bring them together, they suddenly find themselves alone on the most epic of walks and on the precipice of a new friendship. In The Lost Love Songs of Boysie Singh (April) by Ingrid Persaud, winner of the Costa First Novel Award, four women’s lives are connected and controlled by the notorious, charismatic gangster Boysie Singh.

Enlightenment (Penguin, May) by Sarah Perry (The Essex Serpent) is a historical mystery, a story of love, faith and science.

My Friends (Penguin, January) by the Pulitzer Prize winner Hisham Matar is a novel about three friends living in political exile and the emotional homeland deep friendships can provide.

Until August (Penguin, March) is the extraordinary lost novel, a meditation on freedom, regret and love, long hidden in a Texan archive, by Gabriel García Márquez, the late Nobel Prize winning author of Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Rachel Cusk’s Parade (Faber, June) is a path-breaking novel of art, womanhood and violence from the author of the Outline trilogy.

David Peace’s Munich (Faber, August) is the story of how Manchester United rose again after the Munich air disaster, of those who survived and those who did not, of how Britain and football changed, and how it did not; a novel of tragedy, but also of hope.

Jessie Lightfoot: La Nanny de Francis Bacon (Lilliput, June) by Maylis Besserie, tr. Clíona Ní Ríordáin continues the French author’s fascination with Irish cultural figures after novels about Beckett and Yeats.

[ The story about WB Yeats’ bones being sought from a French ossuary inspires French writer ]

In Dear Dickhead (Machlehose, September), by Virginie Despentes and Frank Wynne, an actor in her 50s and a recovering addict and writer accused of sexual harassment embark on a modern-day epistolary exchange, in emails and chat posts.

Green Dot (W&N, February) by Madeleine Grey takes such plot staples as an office romance between a young woman and older man and makes something fresh and funny.

Julia Armfield, best-selling author of Our Wives Under the Sea, returns with Private Rites (4th Estate, June), an unsettling novel following three sisters navigating queer love and faith at the end of the world.

In Choice (Atlantic, April) by the Booker Prize-shortlisted writer Neel Mukherjee, a publisher who is at war with his industry and himself embarks on a radical experiment in his own life and the lives of those connected to him; an academic exchanges one story for another after an accident brings a stranger into her life; and a family in rural India have their lives destroyed by a gift.

The Horse (Faber, May) is Lean on Pete author Willy Vlautin’s most personal novel yet – a poetic and deeply moving story about what it really takes to be a musician.

Moira Buffini’s Songlight (Faber, September) is the first book in the Torch trilogy, an extraordinary debut from the renowned screenwriter, set in a postapocalyptic future where an advanced form of telepathy has emerged.