Bernard MacLaverty, author; Grace Notes, was short-listed for both the Booker and Whitbread Prize
The book I've read and enjoyed most recently is The Star Factory, (Granta, £13.99 in UK) by Ciaran Carson, who has dispensed with all the rules. It's so interesting and so unusual. It's a book about Belfast and language, as well as containing a very moving portrait of his father. Ciaran Carson has gone diving into a word-bath, a memory-bath, and come up with something really special.
Pat Donlon, retired National Library director
Ten Thousand Things is a novel about two strong women in the West Indies by Maria Dermout (Massachusetts UP, £23.95) which was a birthday present from Luke Dodd. This is where friends are so marvellous because they find you books you'd never come across yourself. I've read it many times over the year and it still hasn't made the journey from my bedside table to my bookshelves yet. The ten thousand things of the title are the fragments which make up the mosaic of life.
Iarla O Lionaird, sean-nos singer
I'm quite impetuous in my reading habits, and am usually reading about three books at once. The most extraordinary and beautiful book I've read this year is The Rarest Of The Rare, by Diane Ackerman (Random House, £7.99 in UK). I know it sounds like a cookery book, but it's definitely not! It's a fantastic book about an expedition to see endangered animals and birds in disappearing habitats. Like for instance, she goes in search of the short-tailed albatross. I'm finding it so poetic and inspiring.
Brian McCracken, High Court judge
For me, the most outstanding book I've read this year would have to be Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes (Flamingo, £7.99 in UK). I read it on holiday in about three days. It's such a good read. And although the most striking thing in it is the account of poverty, it also contains so much humour that I wasn't expecting.
Ruairi Quinn, Labour Party leader
My read of the year is a history book, E.J. Hobsbawm's The Age Of Extremes (Abacus, £10.99 in UK). It's a most comprehensive and integrated historical analysis of this century. It sets out many of the ideas and themes which have shaped this century.
Ronan Keating, singer with Boyzone
What I enjoyed most this year was The Barrytown Trilogy by Roddy Doyle (Reed, £12.99). I read it on planes while I was flying all over the world - places like South East Asia - and I loved it because it made me laugh wherever I was in the world at the time.
Mannix Flynn, author; his play Talking To The Wall, won this year's Fringe First at Edinburgh
Knut Hamsun's (Canongate, £6.99 in UK) is still haunting me. The character is a man in a Norwegian city trying to feed himself and to write and at every hand's turn, he's tormented. He's so hungry he pawns his waistcoat and then realises he's also lost his pencil stub, which was in the pocket. It's a magical and terrible insight into the human soul. Everyone should read it.
Mary Banotti, MEP
I loved Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood's novel (Virago, £6.99 in UK). I started reading it during the presidential campaign, and I couldn't leave it down. It's a story of a notorious murderess and it diverted me wonderfully during the election. It's a fascinating book, partly about criminology, and based on a true story in 19th-century Canada. It's written with such great depth and insight into the psychology of a woman's mind.
Seamus Deane, author; Reading In The Dark The Irish Times International Fiction Prize and Irish Literature Prize for Fiction 1997
The book for me this year was Ciaran Carson's The Star Factory. I read it at one sitting; it's the sort of book which absorbs you entirely. Carson has a very strange and eccentric sensibility. The book is a brilliant evocation of Belfast, starting from the smallest of details until it encompasses the whole of the city.
Tom Kenny, owner of Kenny's Bookshop, Galway
I do all my reading in bed; books are such warm tactile things they seem to belong there. In the bookshop, we grab books as soon as they come in the door and the one I pounced on this year was Bernard MacLaverty's Grace Notes (Cape, £14.99 in UK). Apart from being so exquisitely written, it intrigued me that a man was writing from the perspective of a woman. And to tell the truth, after the main character gives birth, I almost felt as if I had experienced it myself.
John Banville, author and literary editor of The Irish Times
I was going to choose Heidegger's Fundamental Concepts Of Metaphysics (I've been reading it for six months), but I knew no one would believe me, so instead, I've chosen Richard Ford's Women With Men (Harvill, £14.99 in UK), a collection of three novellas which together make up the finest work of fiction I have read since . . . well, since his masterly last novel, Independence Day.
Jerome O'Drisceoil, director of Green on Red Gallery
The most powerful book I read this year was Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky (Flamingo, £5.99 in UK). I read it on my honeymoon in Mexico. I wouldn't call it a fun book. Basically, it's a love story and very intense. It's the story of Americans travelling in north Africa, and is a harrowing and disturbing description of life in the desert. I read most of it in the sweltering heat, sitting by the pool or on the beach, looking out at water.
Sean Doran, director of the Belfast Arts Festival
All my books are in Derry but the one I read this year and can't forget is Alan Warner's Morvern Callar (Vintage, £7.99 in UK). It's one of those underground books that you hear about because everyone is talking about it. I ripped through it. It just pulls you in. I think Warner is one of the most exciting voices of the '90s, and he gets across the girl's character so well. It's like watching something at the cinema.
Miriam O'Callaghan, Prime Time
The book that meant most to me this year was one I re-read; Shane Connaughton's A Border Station (Penguin, £5.99 in UK). I reread it because I've just had a baby boy after four daughters and I don't know much about the minds of little boys yet. Connaughton captures the mind of a small boy so brilliantly and the world he lives in.
Bernard Loughlin, director of Annaghmakerrig, the centre for writers and artists
I had to spend a day as an out-patient in hospital recently and Ciaran Carson's The Star Factory was great company. It's written in the same sort of shaggy dog style he developed in his poems. Both of us come from the same shared universe of the Lower Falls and Anderstown that he writes about, which made it so interesting for me to read - particularly the anaesthetic, when I enjoyed it even more.
Enda Walsh, Playwright
Any books I'm carrying around with me are turning into papier mache in all this rain. At the moment I'm working on a screenplay of Disco Pigs, so I'm reading poetry, rather than long texts. But in February, I read and loved Alan Warner's Morvern Callar (Vintage, £7.99 in UK). It's about this girl who lives in this fishing village in Scotland. When her boyfriend commits suicide, she finds on his computer a novel he's written, which she sends off to a publisher and it's a huge success. She heads off to Spain and there are these beautiful passages about landscape - from the claustrophobia of the Scottish village to the bright openness of the Spanish plains.
Patricia Quinn, director of the Arts Council
I was in a bookshop in Cork during the summer, stacking up with novels to take on holiday when I picked up Tom Garvin's 1922; The Birth Of Irish Democracy (Gill and Macmillan, £14.99). I started reading it there and then, standing up in the bookshop. I read it like a page-turner. It's such a confident, mature and utterly compelling analysis of the Irish State. Like all good history, it explains the present, not just the past.
Bertie Ahern, Taoiseach
It has been extremely difficult for me this year to find time to settle down and become engrossed in any book, but I did find time to read Sean Lemass: The Enigmatic Patriot by John Horgan (Gill and Macmillan, £19.99). There are few facets of modern Irish life which do not owe something to the genius, effectiveness or determination of Lemass. Horgan's biography explores that contribution quite brilliantly.
Brian Fallon, The Irish Times Chief Critic
It may sound esoteric, but after some hard thinking I shall settle for Eight German Novellas, translated by Michael Fleming (OUP, £6.99 in UK). Nineteenth-century German literature is one of my enthusiasms, especially the long short story or short novel, and this volume contains some of the real masterpieces of the genre, particularly Morike's haunting Mozart's Journey To Prague and Kleist's The Marchioness Of O which has been made into a film. "Poetic realism" at its best.
Roy Foster, author and historian
Isaiah Berlin's The Proper Study Of Mankind, edited by Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer (Chatto, £25 in UK) explained, more than even the best obituary, why his recent death is the world's loss. It's a new anthology covering the best of his great essays, taking in the Enlightenment, the idea of historical inevitability, Romanticism and nationalism, and conversations with Akhmatova and Pasternak. Berlin's brilliance lay in making profound things lucid, and demonstrating that there is never one simple answer to the philosopher's question of how life should be lived.
John Fitzgerald, Dublin City Manager
For a whole lot of reasons, Angela's Ashes stands out from all the other books I read this year. I'm from Limerick county myself, so it has extra significance for me, although I can't say I'd have experienced that era myself. It's a book I'd like to go back to and read again and there's very few books I've ever said that about.
Donal Dineen, Radio Ireland presenter
For me the strength of any book or album is how you want to pass it on. The book I've read and passed on to several people this year is Nuala O'Faolain's Are You Somebody? (New Island Books, £8.99) I found it profoundly moving and so bravely written. I love the way all the stories in the book connect together and create something so totally engaging and wonderful and brave.
Lainey Keogh, designer; received 1997 People of the Year Award
I made a journey east this year and it happens with every human being who goes east, that they never come back the same. I met this really groovy guy who's a Tibetan scholar and he told me to read this amazing book, Passionate Enlightenment by Miranda Shaw (Princeton UP, £11.50). It's about Buddhism and spirituality from a woman's perspective and it's so mystical and beautiful. I recommend it to every man and woman I know on the planet. Here in Ireland, our sexuality is so caged. This book is something us earthlings can identify with - how an enjoyment of passion and sex is a route to bliss.