How to be a Public Author (Galley Beggar Press) is a skewering of that familiar figure: the drunken would-be author, clattering around at launches and haranguing people with his untested promise. Paul Ewen deftly leads us into Francis Plug's increasingly menacing world, where we start to feel bit mad too.
You're Grand: The Irishwoman's Secret Guide to Life (Hachette Books Ireland), by Tara Flynn, is hilarious and disturbingly acute. Just go to page 48 and look at what she does with "A Day in the Life of Modern Peig".
Evie Wyld's prose is wonderfully intimate and unsettling. In All the Birds, Singing (Vintage) she tells one story through divergent timelines. We learn through flashbacks where the protagonist Jake got her scars, while, in the present, something terrible lurks in the forest.
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The novel won the 2014 Miles Franklin Award, among others. I'm obsessed with it, and with what Wyld is going to do next.
Lisa Coen is one of the founders of Tramp Press
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