The Book Club is reading ... Rain Dogs by Adrian McKinty

This month, we're featuring Rain Dogs by Adrian McKinty. Over the next four weeks we will explore his work, with articles, extracts and interviews, culminating in a podcast. So get the books, sign up below and stay with us

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An RUC and British army vehicle checkpoint during The Troubles. Photograph: Alain Le Garsmeur/Getty Images

‘Sean Duffy is not based on me – but there are elements’

The Catholic RUC officer Adrian McKinty consulted for his Troubles series on what he got right and wrong and why his books matter

Troubles fiction too urgent and topical to be historical

Troubles fiction too urgent and topical to be historical

Liam McIlvanney

Duffy’s character – droll, dissident, driven – anchors the series, but equally vivid is the treatment of place. Belfast and Carrickfergus are like Duffy’s on-off lovers

Sean Duffy series: ‘crime writing at its most visceral and cathartic’

Sean Duffy series: ‘crime writing at its most visceral and cathartic’

Ian Rankin, Diana Gabaldon and Brian McGilloway salute Adrian McKinty’s Troubles crime fiction series

Val McDermid: ‘If you want to understand where we are in 2017, read Rain Dogs’

Val McDermid: ‘If you want to understand where we are in 2017, read Rain Dogs’

McKinty has created the perfect character to explore Northern Ireland’s fragmented, savage and often contradictory world of law enforcement

A Troubles novel? Nobody wants that

A Troubles novel? Nobody wants that

Adrian McKinty

Adrian McKinty: ‘I think readers can sniff out authenticity. Before I’d been making stuff up but now I was telling the truth’

Shane Connaughton

Shane Connaughton leans against the wall outside the Garda Barracks in Redhills.

Married Quarters by Shane Connaughton this summer’s Irish Times Book Club pick

Martin Doyle

The sequel to his acclaimed 1989 debut is set in a Garda station in Cavan in late 1950s

Jennifer Johnston

Jennifer Johnston’s sophisticated, at times deceptively conversational, narratives have drawn on social class in a country caught between Catholic and Protestant cultures. Photograph: Alan Betson

Jennifer Johnston is June’s Irish Times Book Club author

Martin Doyle

Career highlights include The Captains and the Kings, The Old Jest and Shadows on Our Skin

EM Reapy

Elizabeth (EM) Reapy, a writer and tutor from Mayo, was featured in The Long Gaze Back: An Anthology of Irish Women Writers and shortlisted for the 2017 Hennessy Award in Emerging Fiction

Red Dirt by EM Reapy is Book Club pick for May

Debut novel about three young Irish economic migrants in Australia won Newcomer of the Year at the 2016 Irish Book Awards

Conor O'Callaghan

Conor O’Callaghan is from Newry, Co Down, and now lives in Manchester. Nothing on Earth is his first novel

Nothing on Earth by Conor O’Callaghan: April’s Irish Times Book Club choice

Debut novel set on ghost estate highly praised by The Irish Times, Guardian, John Banville, Donal Ryan, Dara Ó Briain and Rick O’Shea

Michael Collins

Michael Collins in the Ireland Park Famine Memorial in Toronto, Canada

Michael Collins is this month’s Irish Times Book Club author

Many of the US-based writer’s works are set in the Rust Belt and depict the souring of the American Dream that prefigured the rise of Donald Trump

Mia Gallagher

“Nothing came near Mia Gallagher’s Beautiful Pictures of the Lost Homeland for bravery and ambition this year,” wrote Mike McCormack

Beautiful Pictures of the Lost Homeland: February’s Book Club choice

Mia Gallagher’s second novel, 12 years in the making after her debut HellFire, has won over critics and fellow writers. Read along with us this month

Centenary special: Maeve Brennan

Fintan O’Toole on Maeve Brennan: No fairy tale ending

Fintan O’Toole on Maeve Brennan: No fairy tale ending

Maeve Brennan: a centenary more bitter than sweet

Maeve Brennan: a centenary more bitter than sweet

Maeve Brennan finds a place at the table

Maeve Brennan finds a place at the table

Maeve Brennan: Lessons and lessons and then more lessons

Maeve Brennan: Lessons and lessons and then more lessons

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