John Boyne
I have a vivid memory of sitting in the Waterstones staff room on Dawson Street in Dublin a week before Christmas 2001, reading Austerlitz by the German writer WG Sebald. I’d reached the point where the narrator learns about his mother’s fate in a concentration camp and was feeling so affected by it that I had to put the book down. Picking up a copy of The Irish Times, I flicked through it and came across an article detailing Sebald’s death in a car crash in Norwich a few days earlier. The combination of both, this unhappy coincidence, saw me locking myself in the bathroom, where I wept like a baby for the tragic loss of someone who still had so much to offer the world.
John Boyne’s latest novel is Fire
Helen Cullen
My internal tear-duct operating system seems to be programmed to over-react to trivial things, inanimate objects or even the sight of an elderly person on their own (my husband calls me the patron saint of elders on the Tube), but it ceases production in the face of anything truly serious. Similarly, despite literature being the great love of my life, I am seldom moved to tears by a book. One that circumvented all control systems, however, was Tin Man, by Sarah Winman. In this slim novel Winman unravels the beautifully nuanced relationships between Ellis and his deceased wife, Annie, between Ellis and his lover in adolescence, Michael, and the friendship between all three. Set against the backdrop of the Aids crisis, Winman writes with great sensitivity about unfulfilled potential, in terms both of affairs of the heart and of suppressed creativity. It is such a powerful story, told delicately, without ever slipping into sentimentality. And it completely broke me.
Helen Cullen’s latest novel is The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually
Donald Clarke
My earliest choice would have been Mole choking up with instinctive homesickness as he passes near his old burrow at Christmastime in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. Later, any number of painfully sad passages by the great English writer Elizabeth Taylor but, more than any other, the wrenching end of Angel, her 1957 novel. It seems it is possible to care profoundly for a character who is selfish, dim, misguided and largely talentless. An extraordinary trick to pull off.
Donald Clarke is the Irish Times’ chief film correspondent
Edel Coffey
The first time I remember crying actual tears over a book was as a teenager, reading AS Byatt’s Possession on the Dart. It has a gut punch of an ending, and I remember just bursting into tears as I finished the book. Not ideal for the morning commute to school. I also cried embarrassingly uncontrollable tears in a coffee shop while reading Emilie Pine’s Notes to Self. I was a new mother, and her essay about child loss and fertility had me sobbing into my coffee.
Edel Coffey’s latest novel is In Her Place
Martina Evans
Just two pages in Clair Wills’s Missing Persons, or My Grandmother’s Secrets charts the “crazed and painful days” of June 1996, when Wills’s baby Thaddeus died after less than an hour. Her decision to bury him under a huge Hornton stone and her craving for ritual are described with such piercing precision, such absence of self-pity, that it would draw a tear from the above-mentioned stone. In a book centred on the story of the Tuam babies, it is a steamroller of literature.
Martina Evans’s latest collection is The Coming Thing
Sarah Gilmartin
Fíona Scarlett’s debut novel, Boys Don’t Cry, was quietly devastating. No matter how many times I read Foster, by Claire Keegan, the ending always gets me. The remarkable intimacy of the young girl’s voice, and the clear, compact structure, build to a great intensity of feeling. We are right there with her, caught between two very different fathers, two very different worlds. I went with my own father to see Sebastian Barry’s The Steward of Christendom at the Gate Theatre a couple of years back and was deeply moved by Owen Roe’s performance as a grieving, addled, incarcerated father and former chief of the Dublin Metropolitan Police.
Sarah Gilmartin’s latest novel is Service
Neil Hegarty
I recently reread Michael Malay’s Late Light, from 2023, which examines the lives and looming extinctions of four unglamorous species (eel, moth, mussel, cricket) and speaks urgently to its time and place. Surveying the wreckage of nature in Ireland, one cannot but weep – but this book’s power lies in its specific message: that we must cultivate a sense of neighbourliness with the natural world. Consolation, too, then – so long as we act as well as feel.
Neil Hegarty’s latest publication is Impermanence, edited with Nora Hickey M’Sichili
Claire Hennessy
A book that recently saw me sobbing inconsolably over its final pages: Elizabeth Strout’s Tell Me Everything, which sees several of the author’s beloved characters unite in the lit-fic answer to The Avengers. One that forever haunts: Tim O’Brien’s interlinked semi-autobiographical Vietnam War tales, The Things They Carried, including these closing lines by a young man en route to Canada to escape the draft: “I was a coward. I went to the war.”
Claire Hennessy’s short-story collection, In the Movie of Her Life, is due to be published in spring 2025
Rónán Hession
In Melancholy I-II (translated by Damion Searls and Grethe Kvernes) Jon Fosse writes beautifully about the troubled Norwegian painter Lars Hertervig, who died in 1902 and who suffered from social isolation and mental illness during his sad lifetime. Even more moving is Fosse’s depiction of the last day of Hertervig’s (fictional) sister, Oline. Her body in decline, her mind failing, we share her final yearning for relief. A profoundly moving and sublime piece of writing.
Rónán Hession’s latest novel is Ghost Mountain
Julia Kelly
Three books I’ve found profoundly moving, no matter how many times I’ve reread them, are John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Stoner by John Williams, which describes the mundane life and unremarkable death of a college professor, and Claire Keegan’s Foster, portraying the love that develops between a child and a grieving parent. Each of these stories is quiet and understated yet all the more devastating because of its lightness of touch.
Julia Kelly’s fourth book, Still, will be published by New Island in September
Ferdia Lennon
Like almost all of John Fante’s work, The Brotherhood of the Grape is heavily autobiographical; it tells the story of a middle-aged writer accompanying his old, ailing and alcoholic bricklayer father on the somewhat quixotic attempt to build a smokehouse in the California hills. Fante is exceptional at capturing the push and pull of love and the rage that only family can inspire. It’s a story of fraught relationships between deeply flawed people, and it’s this fractured quality to everything that makes the tenderness and love within the book all the more moving. I laughed, I cried, I bought copies for friends and family.
Ferdia Lennon’s novel Glorious Exploits won the Waterstone’s debut fiction prize
Mia Levitin
Tear-jerkers speak to the cathartic power of literature. (It’s not for nothing that hashtags such as #booksthatmakeyoucry drove BookTok’s explosion in the wake of Covid.) Charlotte’s Web, by EB White, loses none of its impact for knowing what’s coming. This year, both Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings and Rachel Clarke’s The Story of a Heart, about the two families linked by a nine-year-old’s organ donation, left me blubbering uncontrollably in public places.
Mia Levitin is a book critic
Henrietta McKervey
In Lorrie Moore’s Anagrams, Benna Carpenter invents shiny new versions of her life: singer, poet, lover. The novel ends with Benna spending Christmas Eve alone with her brother. She leaves early Christmas Day, thinking: “She knew he hadn’t a friend in the world. The two of them: how had they come to this?” Suddenly, her wisecracking young daughter, George, appears at her side. Only now do I realise George, too, is imaginary. My heart breaks for Benna.
Henrietta McKervey’s latest novel is A Talented Man
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne
The wizard of the moving scene is Charles Dickens. No novel can make you laugh and cry as much as David Copperfield. I cry when David finds refuge in the magical house in a boat at Yarmouth, with Peggotty and Ham and Little Em’ly, and when Little Em’ly is returned after her seduction by the cad Steerforth. The art of the tear-jerking is rarer now but not lost. Christine Dwyer Hickey has a brilliant scene in Our London Lives where Milly spends a lot of time and money choosing a present for her daughter’s birthday – a gift that will never be given because the child was given up for adoption. The grief of that trope of Irish literature the unmarried mother is caught more sensitively and deeply here than in a thousand movies about cruel Magdalene laundries.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s latest publication is Well, You Don’t Look It!: Women Writers in Ireland Reflect on Ageing
Nuala O’Connor
Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince is a storybook that has always moved me intensely. It’s a paean to friendship, the maturing mind and compassion. I love the offbeat friendship between the prince and the swallow, the melancholic atmosphere and the fairy-tale morality. It has perfect storyness: gorgeous language, recurring motifs, beautiful sadness, a touch of humour, a crescendo and a definitive ending. An emotional story, it also makes me think about other lives, other possibilities, other places.
Nuala O’Connor’s latest novel is Seaborne
Nadine O’Regan
Is a book that makes you cry a good book? Not necessarily. Tears have to feel earned; too crude or obvious manipulations can feel cheap. Knowing this, Sally Rooney’s most recent novel, Intermezzo, steps carefully: her characters are damaged. There are great tensions between two brothers, Peter and Ivan; other divisions. I can’t say much more without giving too much away. But by the novel’s close the tears sprang to my eyes – not because everything was resolved, or because nothing was, but because she had brought home the fullness and complexity of their worlds. The brothers’ great loneliness; the evocation of their intense desire to belong is one of the novel’s great achievements. “Nothing is fixed,” Peter says. I wanted all to be well. But, like her characters, I wasn’t sure if it ever could be.
Nadine O’Regan is acting editor of the Irish Times Magazine
John Self
I don’t often cry at books – music is a different matter – but Roddy Doyle did a number on me with The Women Behind the Door this year. He had just made me laugh when suddenly there was a line about Paula Spencer being reluctant to tell her daughter about her troubles – “Paula’s the teenager – she’s giving away the minimum” – that made me well up, and stop, and put the book down. I was crying for my own teenager, of course, and for myself, but isn’t that always the way?
John Self is a book critic
