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Eileen Battersby

Eileen Battersby

Literary Correspondent

Eileen Battersby is an Irish Times staff journalist and our literary correspondent. She has written about all aspects of the arts, particularly classical music and literature, as well as archaeology, historical geography and architectural history and has championed fiction in translation.

Four times winner of the Arts Journalist of the Year award, she has most recently won the Critic of the Year and has published two books; Second Readings and Ordinary Dogs.

All That Is, by James Salter

Sex is a battlefield in the octogenarian American writer’s new novel

An Englishman in Madrid, by Eduardo Mendoza

The 2010 winner of the €601,000 Planeta prize is an entertaining but forgettable burlesque set in civil war Madrid

Constance, by Patrick McGrath

Its author’s familiar preoccupations – sexual obsession, emotional trauma, destructive relationships – feature in his slight new (...)

Asunder, by Chloe Aridjis

Eileen Battersby finds the Mexican-American writer’s second novel chillier than her first

Nothing Gold Can Stay by Ron Rash

There’s precious little gold in this new book of short stories by the gifted Appalachian-based poet and storyteller Ron Rash

Levels of Life, by Julian Barnes

The English novelist’s non-fiction account of his grief following the death of his wife is brave, moving and heartfelt

Home Fires, by Elizabeth Day

Kinship ties end up in a claustrophobic knot in Day’s impressive second novel

Brief Loves That Life Forever, by Andrei Makine

From fear to frustrated idealism, aspects of Soviet life are recalled by a watchful narrator

Underground Time, by Delphine de Vigan, translated by George Miller

This Impac-listed novel about a bullied office worker will strike a chord if you’ve ever been the victim of workplace back-stabbin(...)

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