Five writers who have addressed modern Dublin

Bad Day in Blackrock

By Kevin Power

“This was the world of Brookfield and UCD, of Americanized slang and easy credit, of two-car families and cheap cocaine. This was a world in which, on any given evening, you could watch while a pyjamaed teenage girl with back-combed hair and furry boots jogged across the bleak forecourt of an all-night petrol station to buy a packet of safety razors to cut herself with.

“And it hasn’t ended yet. Ask anyone. Ask me, on a good day . . . Girls still wear their Ugg boots and their Prada perfume. Boys still play rugby for school in leafy suburbs. Families still have two cars, utility rooms, wine cellars, Latvian maids to clean the kitchen.”

City of Lost Girls

By Declan Hughes

“I have whiled away hours at my window watching the repetitious, endlessly enthralling drama unfold, day after day: the mothers exhausted and overwhelmed, the fathers proud and scared, the grandparents swaggering or blase, the sibling excited and jealous; and then the notable exceptions in each category: the unaffectionate, the indifferent, the resigned and the bored; meanwhile, swarming across the stage like jesters and like fools, the smokers.”

The Journey Home

By Dermot Bolger

“A decade had worked its influence. The alder bushes were gone, the last of the hens butchered. Patios had appeared with crazy paving, mock Grecian fonts made of plastic, and everywhere, like a frozen river, concrete reigned. Porches had sprung up bearing ludicrous names, Ashbrook, Riverglade, The Dell, each neighbour jockeying to be the first to discard their past. Only our garden had remained untouched, the potato beds becoming overgrown and the roof caving in on the felt-covered hut where my hands had once searched for eggs in straw.”

Faithful Place

By Tana French

“The lanes and alleys had the same look as the people at Kevin’s wake, twisted versions of the familiar, like a joke I wasn’t in on: brand-new BMWs jammed together in front of what used to be tenements, teenage mas yelling into designer prams, dusty corner shops turned into shiny franchises . . . I was at Pat’s Cathedral. I sat in the gardens for a while, resting my eyes on something that had stayed put for eight hundred years and listening to drivers work themselves into road rage as rush hour got closer and the traffic stopped moving.”

Mistaken

By Neil Jordan

“I was in number 14, Marino Crescent and the window looked out on the forlorn flower beds and cherry trees of Fairview Park. I had grown up in this house. My mother managed the flats above, my father ran a bookie’s shop on Lower Abbey Street and on various stands at race meetings around the country when the bookies’ shop failed.”