Books of the year: who was reading what in 2003

What were the best titles of the year gone by? Belinda McKeon takes soundings from some people who might know.

What were the best titles of the year gone by? Belinda McKeon takes soundings from some people who might know.

Emily O'Reilly

Bad Blood, by Rosemary Daly (Poolbeg, €12.99), told, from the Irish Haemophilia Society's point of view, a story that I had covered a lot as a journalist: that of the 100-plus haemophiliac deaths from infected BTSB blood product and the tribunal that followed. It wasn't just a moving book, but in my new role, it was a reminder of what can happen when the State sets itself up in opposition to the people and views its interests as separate to those that it serves. Another book I read when I took up office, perhaps looking for tips, was Rudolph Giuliani's Leadership (Time Warner, £8.99), the core of which was his experience of 9/11. Most recently, I've been reading A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life and Death of My Husband Danny Pearl (Virago £10.99), Marianne Pearl's book on the death of her husband. As a former journalist, I found it a remarkable reminder that journalism can be noble, and a very different perspective on al-Qaeda, a sense of the individuals behind the network. And finally, to prove that I am still a girl, I have been reading The Devil Wears Prada (Harper Collins, £6.99), by Lauren Weisberger, which reveals an amazing and weird world, thinly veiled as fiction.

Emily O'Reilly is the Ombudsman and Information Commissioner

READ MORE

Colm Tóibín

In poetry: R.F. Foster's W.B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. II - The Arch-Poet 1915-39 (OUP, £30); superb on the poetry, the politics and the personal life; Robert Lowell's Collected Poems (Faber, £40) which includes not only the work of a protean and restless talent, but early drafts of important poems as well. In fiction: Peter Woods's Hard Shoulder (New Island, €12.99), a novel about exile and work written with a spare, sour poetry; The Great Fire (Virago, £15.99), Shirley Hazzard's first novel in more than 20 years, a story of survival, illness and sexual obsession in the aftermath of the second World War; some of the sentences are exquisitely beautiful; the writing is a lesson to us all. In non-fiction: Paul Durcan's Diary (New Island, €12.99) has, among many other matters, the most eloquent commentary written in Ireland on the Iraq War, combining the personal, the political and the passionate.

Colm Tóibín's novel, The Master, will be published by Picador in March 2004; his first play, Beauty in a Broken Place, will run at the Peacock next August

Cecelia Ahern

As soon as I had read the first page of Morag Prunty's Poison Arrows (Tivoli, €9.99), I was faced with that awful dilemma of wanting to read every page as quickly as I could yet not wanting to say goodbye to the wonderful worlds and characters the authors created. Sophie Kinsella's Can You Keep a Secret? (Black Swan, £6.99) is one of those books you secretly think is written about and for you, while Sharon Owens's The Tea House on Mulberry Street (Poolbeg, €13.99) made me refuse nights out in favour of curling up on the couch in my pyjamas, book in one hand, a mug of steaming coffee in the other and dreaming of the mouth-watering delights the book so vividly describes.

Cecelia Ahern's début novel, P.S. I Love You, will be published by Hyperion in February

John Banville

The biography of the year - of the decade - is surely R.F. Foster's W.B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. II - The Arch-Poet, a magnificent account of a magnificent life, and a timely redefinition of that difficult concept, "Irishness". In poetry, Robert Lowell: Collected Poems, edited by Frank Bidart and David Gawanter (Faber, £40), is a recuperation of the life-work of one of the great poets of the last century, whose reputation has unaccountably declined since his death in 1977. And even though I am in it, I must ruefully acknowledge Mortification: Writers' Stories of their Public Shame, edited by Robin Robertson (Fourth Estate, £16.99: see review on Weekend page 12), a clutch of cringe-per-page tales from the hard life, at the desk but mostly on the road; red-faced, funny, and abjectly revealing.

John Banville's most recent book is Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City, published by Bloomsbury

Claire Kilroy

Two new Irish books that I found so companionable and engaging that I missed them when they were finished were The Parts, by Keith Ridgway (Faber, £14.99), and No 5, by Glenn Patterson (Hamish Hamilton £12.99). Call Me The Breeze, by Patrick McCabe (Faber, £16.99), is unusually poignant in its portrayal of innocence and friendship within a spectacularly sinister setting. I picked up The Very Man by Chris Binchy (Macmillan, £10) because I wanted to know why men are righteous gits. Apparently they just can't help it, but it makes for cruelly entertaining reading, watching one such righteous git self-destruct. Showstopper of the year had to be Vernon God Little by D.B.C. Pierre (Faber, £14.99). It's an extremely funny/sad book, and I was thoroughly disarmed by it.

Claire Kilroy's début novel, All Summer, was published this year by Faber & Faber

Raymond Deane

Among this year's anti-establishment blockbusters, Mark Curtis's Web of Deceit: Britain's Real Role in the World (Vintage, £7.99) has been the most underrated. Without the fireworks of a Michael Moore, Curtis painstakingly proves that Blair's Britain is an "outlaw state" of the worst kind. Two of my preoccupations come together in Parallels and Paradoxes (Bloomsbury £16.99), conversations on music and Israeli/Palestinian politics between Daniel Barenboim and the sadly deceased Edward Said. For Anatole's Tomb (Carcanet £9.95) is a bilingual edition of Mallarmé's fragmentary poems on the death of his son, intelligently translated and introduced by Patrick McGuinness. A book that dismantles the anglophone stereotype of Mallarmé as a precious Symbolist.

The world première of Raymond Deane's Violin Concerto took place at the National Concert Hall in October. RTÉ's second Living Music Festival, of which he is artistic director, will be held at The Helix in February. He is also chairman of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign

Bernard O'Donoghue

There were two pre-eminent books of Irish interest this year: Brian Lalor's huge Enyclopaedia of Ireland (Gill & Macmillan, €65) is a magnificent achievement, the kind of book you can never put down because the next entry is always as interesting as the one you are looking up. And R.F. Foster's W.B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. II - The Arch-Poet, the second volume of his biography of Yeats completes with great elegance the most important Irish biographical project of the era. Outside Ireland, it was hard to keep pace with J.M. Coetzee; Youth (Vintage, £6.99) is an extraordinarily crystalline and bleak evocation of London in the 1960s, a world of libertine pleasure that always remained out of everyone's reach. Robin Robertson's Mortification: Writers' Stories of their Public Shame (Fourth Estate, £16.99) is a hilarious holiday-book, devoted mostly to the wretchedness of ill-attended and/or drunken readings. Mostly it is creasing pieces of self-laceration; but just as funny are the narratives of writers whose vanity prevents them from conceiving what mortification is, let alone describing it.

Bernard O'Donoghue teaches English at Wadham College, Oxford. His latest collection of poems, Outliving, which was published this year by Chatto & Windus, is on the shortlist for the T.S. Eliot Prize, to be announced in January

Declan Kiberd

For me, the book of the year was Revival (Cork University Press, €20), by P.J. Mathews. Not only did it insert some masterworks of the Irish renaissance back into the flow of those weekly events which helped to give rise to them from 1899-1904, and show how bound together, under the broad banner of "self-help" were the varied movements of the period; it was as much about 1999-2004, filled with echoes of our own recent past and implications for our continuing present. Katy Hayes's novel Lindbergh's Legacy (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £12.99), a profound meditation, by way of comparison and contrast, on the years of the Celtic Tiger, also probed the continuities and discontinuities between the Irish past and present. Right now, I'm enjoying two books on the making of modern Europe - Eric Hobsbawm's Interesting Times (Allen Lane, £25), and Desmond Fennell's The Revision of European History (Athol, £7.50).

Declan Kiberd is Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin. His Irish Classics won last year's Truman Capote Prize for English-Language Criticism

Denis Donoghue

Carol Loeb Shloss's Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, $30), is an honourable biography of poor Lucia, who may not have been mad but was without doubt astray. A sad woman, probably tedious at times, but she didn't deserve to be (by anyone) unloved. Penelope Fitzgerald's The Afterlife: Essays and Criticism (Counterpoint, £20.50), is an unfailingly perceptive and decent gathering of commentaries by the author of The Blue Flower, who practised literary criticism according to the method recommended by T.S. Eliot, that of "being very intelligent". Meanwhile, Departure: Poems (W.W. Norton, $22.95) the fourth book of poetry from Rosanna Warren, daughter of Eleanor Clark and Robert Penn Warren, is luminous and endlessly attractive.

Denis Donoghue is Henry James Professor in English and American Letters at New York University. His most recent book, Speaking of Beauty, was published this year by Yale University Press

Liz McManus

My first choice is John Arden's collection of stories, The Stealing Steps (Methuen, £16.99), which reaffirms its author's linguistic and literary talents, and raises the question of why this writer doesn't receive the acknowledgement that he deserves in Ireland. Maev-Ann Wren's Unhealthy State (New Island, €12.99) is the definitive study of the Irish health service. Thoughtful and thought-provoking, Wren constructs an unbeatable case for reform. This is a book for anyone trying to come to grips with how we have gotten the health service we have and what we are going to do to change it. Meanwhile, The Bookseller of Kabul, by Asne Seierstad (Little, Brown, £12.99), gives an insight into life under the burka and within the family in modern-day Kabul.

Liz McManus is deputy leader of the Labour Party

Frank Kermode

First place must go to the second volume of R.F. Foster's W.B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. II - The Arch-Poet. Foster's control of such voluminous material is remarkable in itself, but it is not achieved at the expense of lucidity nor of intelligent reading of the poetry. And through its long course we are constantly enlivened by Foster's ironical wit. The other book I shall remember is Alethea Hayter's The Wreck of the Abergavenny (Pan Macmillan, £14.99). The captain of that East Indiaman was John Wordsworth, brother of the poet, and Hayter is interested not only in the way the family and their friends reacted to their loss, but also in the extraordinary arrangements made by the East India Company to secure profit and patronage. And she provides a brilliantly detailed and seaman-like account of the wreck itself.

Pieces of My Mind, a collection of Frank Kermode's essays from 1958-2002, was published this year by Allen Lane

Marina Warner

The voice of the late Edward Said can still be heard in all its trenchant vitality in conversation with Daniel Barenboim in Parallels & Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (Bloomsbury £16.99), as well as in a vivid polemical lecture, Freud and the Non-European (Verso, £13.00). I was entranced by the impossible love story in Wolfgang Koeppen's A Sad Affair (Granta Books, £7.99), here luminously translated by the poet Michael Hofmann. Written in 1936, it was this rueful, frank author's first novel, which ran into censorship troubles and hasn't appeared in English before. Edmund White's Fanny: A Romance (Chatto & Windus, £16.99) sparkles with wit, sympathy and insights, while drawing a thronged and fascinating panorama of America in the decades after Independence. Paula Rego has become one of the foremost graphic artists since Goya, and her irrepressible storytelling output and dazzling technical versatility are wonderfully represented in The Complete Graphic Art of Paula Rego, ed. Tom Rosenthal (Thames & Hudson, £60).

Marina Warner is currently Visiting Fellow at the Italian Academy of Columbia University, New York, where she is finishing a book, Figuring the Soul. Her most recent books are Signs & Wonders: Essays in Literature and Culture (Chatto & Windus) and Murderers I Have Known (Vintage)

John Montague

Since I am neither a businessman, a tribunal lawyer nor a politician, I cannot easily afford new hardbound books. So I was delighted when Seamus Heaney passed on a proof copy of W.B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. II - The Arch-Poet, in which R.F. Foster's training as an historian and his feeling for literature join together to create both a formidable scholarly work and a marvellous story. What of his successors? I dipped into the Collected Poems of Robert Lowell (Faber, £40) and Ted Hughes (Faber, £40), both enormous, which represent our last half-century in poetry. What is missing is Yeats's sense of strategy. Back home, the continuously inventive Ciaran Carson adapts the short line of William Carlos Williams to his native Belfast in Breaking News (Gallery, €11.40). If the Carson seems impersonal, Michael Hartnett's Translations (Gallery, €13.99) have an old-fashioned zest; shades of Mangan, who seems to have risen from the dead this year. Finally, The Three Irish Poets (Carcanet, £8.95) is a showcase for the varied talents of Eavan Boland, Paula Meehan and Mary O'Malley.

John Montague is working on further memoirs, as well as a new volume of poems, tentatively titled The Drunken Sailor

Hugo Hamilton

Damon Galgut has done the most difficult thing for any novelist in A Good Doctor (Atlantic, £10.99), drawing the changing political landscape in post-apartheid South Africa without a hint of polemics. A simple and very intimate story, eddying out into more powerful exploration of ethnic issues. Equally impressive, but on a more panoramic scale, is Star of the Sea (Vintage, €9.95), by Joseph O'Connor. He has become Ireland's great storyteller, taking on the big famine subject and making it relevant today. Dancer (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, £12.99) has the most extraordinary opening chapter of any book I've read recently. The cold war story of Rudolf Nureyev becomes the history of America, the place of refuge as well as the place of total excess. Finally, George Monbiot is like a warning from the future with his daring manifesto for a fair world in Age of Consent (Flamingo, £15.99). We can't afford to ignore him.

Hugo Hamilton's memoir The Speckled People was published this year by Fourth Estate

Caroline Walsh

R.F. Foster's W.B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. II - The Arch-Poet achieved that rare feat of becoming a classic on publication. One of its greatest illuminations is on the imaginative and deeply necessary role Yeats played in the embryonic years of the Free State. Spanish fiction continues at floodtide, part of the cultural reassessment of the Franco years, and Javier Cercas's Soldiers of Salamis (Bloomsbury, £14.99) shows what truths can emerge when history meets fiction. Exploring notions of heroism ,it pulls an olive branch of redemption from territory long mired in terror and strife - the Spanish Civil War. Pedro Rosa Mendes's Bay of Tigers: A Journey Through War-Torn Angola (Granta Books, £12.99) charts the surreal trek its Portuguese author made into the heart of darkness; a world where land-mines are more ubiquitous than people and ghostly lines of amputees straddle the bush. Reportage at its finest. Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City (Bloomsbury, £9.99), for its evocation of the world of photographer Josef Sudek and for providing a lure that will have to be obeyed to the city on the Vltava.

Caroline Walsh is Literary Editor of The Irish Times. Arrows in Flight, her collection of short stories by contemporary Irish writers, has just been published in America by Carroll & Graf under the title Dislocation

Roy Foster

Bernard O'Donoghue's 2003 collection, Outliving (Chatto, £8.99), isdedicated to his neighbours in North Cork, and poems like 'Kerry-Cavan 1955' and 'The Orange Girls of Cork' should go straight into any Irish anthology. But themes from English medieval literature are woven through as well, and he achieves real profundity without sacrificing clarity. Another gifted poet, Michael Hofman, has produced a wonderful version of Joseph Roth's great novel The Radetzky March (Granta, £9.99), dealing with the decline of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Inadequate people are shown stumbling against the backdrop of a fatally immobilised ancien régime, with Roth's peculiar blend of pathos, anger and hilarity. Richard English's Armed Struggle: A History of the IRA (Macmillan, £20) is a powerful intervention into an area bedevilled by half-truths, shoddy journalism, skewed interpretations and wishful thinking. His clarification of the political, psychological and intellectual roots and rationale of the movement, and its recent change of direction, should be taken very seriously indeed.

Roy Foster is Carroll Professor of Irish History at Hertford College, Oxford. His most recent book, W.B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. II - The Arch-Poet, was published this year by Oxford University Press

Michael Cronin

I greatly enjoyed Liam Mac Cóil's Nótaí ón Lár (Leabhar Breac, €8.50), an erudite, forthright and puckish public diary that takes the reader from Rath Cairn to Zurich and from the politics of Máirtín Ó Cadhain to the neglected musical achievements of Charles Villiers Stanford. Two collections of essays that appeared during the year were a challenging read and a useful antidote to the market fundamentalism which blights much political debate in Ireland, Colin Coulter and Steve Coleman's (eds.) The End of Irish History? (Manchester University Press, £14.99 ) and Michael Böss and Eamon Maher's (eds.) Engaging Modernity (Veritas, €19.95). An unexpected treasure was Pierre Mérot's Mammifères (Flammarion, €18), a deliciously wry account of a life marred by drink, bad sex and a mother who means well.

Michael Cronin's Translation and Globalisation (Routledge) and Time Tracks: Scenes from the Irish Everyday (New Island) were published this year. He is Director at the DCU Centre for Translation and Textual Studies

Éilís Ní Dhuibhne

I'm not usually a big fan of historical fiction but among my favourite novels this year were Per Olov Enquist's The Visit of the Royal Physician (Vintage, £6.99), set at the Danish court in the age of the enlightenment. It tells the story of the mentally ill King Christian VII and is grim, original and brilliantly entertaining. Writing other people's novels for them is a risky undertaking; Clare Boylan's Emma Brown (Little, Brown, £16.99), however, the completion of a fragment begun by Charlotte Brontë, is convincingly Charlottean, its earnest drama refreshingly lightened by a subtle seasoning of Boylan irony. Finally, the astonishing Lara Harte, who published her first novel at the age of twenty, has gone from strength to strength and has written a truly impressive novel in Wild Geese (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £12.99). Good poetry included Mary O'Donnell's September Elegies (Lapwing, £7.50), a mature and beautiful collection.

Éilís Ní Dhuibne was this year elected to Aosdána. Her novel Cailíní Beaga Gleann na mBláth was published this year by Cois Life, and Cork University Press reissued Midwife to the Fairies, a collection of short stories

Terry Eagleton

Roy Porter's Flesh in the Age of Reason (Allen Lane, £25) reminds us just what a scurvy, gouty, scrofulous bunch were such high-minded 18th-century authors as David Hume, Edward Gibbon and Samuel Johnson, as well as reminding us of the sad mortality of Porter himself, who died two years ago while still at the height of his remarkable powers. Luke Gibbons's Edmund Burke and Ireland (Cambridge University Press, £25) is a dazzling investigation of the Irish roots of Burke's thought which ranges from ideas of terror and the sublime to the wounded body and the Great Famine. An intellectual feast.

Terry Eagleton's publications this year include Figures of Dissent (Verso) and After Theory (Penguin)

Peter Sheridan

It was at a writers' day in Tallaght I first heard Hugo Hamilton tell the remarkable story of how he was forced to celebrate his German/Irish roots by wearing lederhosen in combination with an Aran sweater. It was an anecdote that whetted my appetite and The Speckled People (Fourth Estate, £15.99) more than satisfied the wait. It is a book full of peculiarity and strange perspectives that make you feel like you've never read anything like it before. A stand-alone memoir, a pure gem. The surprise read of the year was Michael J. Fox's Lucky Man (Ebury, £6.99), a book by a celebrity that wasn't about celebrity. It charts his coming to terms with Parkinson's disease and is written in an unpretentious style full of humour and genuine openness.

Peter Sheridan's novel, Big Fat Love, was published this year by Tivoli. A new play, Finders Keepers, will open at the Peacock Theatre in February, as part of the National Theatre's centenary celebrations

Thomas Kilroy

Less eccentric than Pynchon, more profound than de Lillo, Richard Powers is also driven by that peculiarly American ambition, to write a Book about Everything. His novel The Time of Our Singing (Heinemann, £14.99) is about race, the Jews, music, physics and much else besides. An astonishing writer. Two memoirs which restore that battered form to some respectability: Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Living to Tell the Tale (Cape, £18.99) and Janet Malcolm's Reading Chekhov (Granta, £13.99). Marquez's is a palimpsest of the great fiction, written in that same, pure, torrential style, with the same mastery of the unexpected. Malcolm "reads" Chekhov on a journey through Yeltsin's ramshackle Russia, curiously right for a writer who died prematurely but "wrote as if he were old".

Thomas Kilroy's most recent play, The Shape of Metal, was produced at the Abbey Theatre as part of this year's Dublin Theatre Festival

George Szirtes

Andrey Platonov has been dead over 50 years. His novel Soul (Harvill, £11.99), towers above anything else I have read this year. Translated beautifully from the Russian by Robert Chandler and others, it is set in the 1930s of the Stalinist Soviet Union; in the Asian desert to be precise. It is dark, ascetic, innocent, humane and mystical. Katharina Hacker's short stories, Morpheus (Toby Press, $12.95), again excellently translated, from the German, delicately and sharply refresh classical myths in a way that is so hard to carry off. Some excellent contemporary poetry, but, though it was first published by Carcanet in 2000, the new Penguin edition of Robert Graves's The Complete Poems (Penguin, £20) is the one: indispensable and monumental.

George Szirtes's most recent books are The Budapest File and An English Apocalypse, both published by Bloodaxe

Peter Woods

Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas is about the Spanish Civil War and much else besides. A new way of writing history that manages to be both funny and tragic. Monica Ali's Brick Lane (Doubleday, £12.99) brings alive the world of Muslim emigrants to London's East End. A compassionate work which makes the mundane exotic. Robert Lowell's Collected Poems (Faber, £40), which is a kind of a cheatas it's an expensive book that I've only leafed through in shops so far, although I have most of the poems included. I've loved Lowell's audacity from when I first read 'For The Union Dead'. Its language and imagery, 'a savage servility slides by on grease', remain with me constantly. Vincent Woods's - no relation - Lives and Miracles (Arlen House, €20) is a book of poetry full of vibrant language, rooted in place and the vernacular.

Peter Woods is a radio producer with RTÉ Radio One. His novel, Hard Shoulder, was published this year by New Island

Medbh McGuckian

On the bicentenary of the 1803 rebellion, I read everything I could on the fascinating "career" of Robert Emmet. In Robert Emmet and the Rising of 1803 and Robert Emmet and the 1798 Rebellion (both Irish Academic Press, €49.50 hbk, €27.50 pbk), I found most illuminating Ruán O'Donnell's argument that the crisis had been more dangerous than Emmet had understood, rendering him a defuser rather than a catalyst. The opposite position with regard to Roger Casement is taken by Angus Mitchell in Casement (Haus, £8.99), his attractive if brief study of the man, indicating that Casement was of central and absolute strategic importance in the Rising. In poetry, I am enjoying Marie Heaney's keepsake Hearts Mysteries (Townhouse, £10.99) for its personal honesty and inclusion of work by 14 women poets out of 50, including Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin's masterly 'That Summer'.

Medbh McGuckian's collection, Had I A Thousand Lives, was published this year by Gallery Press. Her new collection, The Book of the Angel, is due to be published, also by Gallery Press, next year

Ian Duhig

My first choice is R.F. Foster's W.B. Yeats: A Life, Vol II - The Arch-Poet, the concluding volume of his magisterial biography of the great poet. Reading it, you don't just understand Yeats better: you understand Ireland better as well. Next it's Scenes from a Long Sleep: New and Collected Poems by Peter Didsbury (Bloodaxe, £10.95). An archaeologist, Didsbury's work reads like Paul Muldoon's as if written by the author of 'The Song of Solomon'. Unique. Finally, another book about a poet, albeit one better known for his statecraft, is Lauro Martines's April Blood (Cape, £17.99) concerning "The Magnificent" Lorenzo and the Pazzi Conspiracy to overthrow his Medicean dictatorship. It failed, and Lorenzo's revenge was comprehensive in an age when law was codified revenge - a poacher could be executed by having a whole hare, fur and all, forced down his throat. A lovely, bloody book that stinks of Quattrocento Florence.

Ian Duhig is at present International Writer Fellow at the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing at TCD. His most recent collection, The Lammas Hireling (Picador), was nominated for the Forward Best Collection Prize, and has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize

Angela Bourke

Two huge works inspired by poetry complement each other this year: R.F. Foster's W.B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. II - The Arch-Poet, captures the texture of life among Ireland's urban opinion-makers before the second World War, while Pádraigín Ní Uallacháin's beautiful A Hidden Ulster: People, Songs and Traditions of Oriel (Four Courts Press, €29.95) is like a door that suddenly opens in the side of a cliff, revealing a rich and busy life within. One important new book is not yet available in Ireland: Bridget Connnelly's Forgetting Ireland: Uncovering a Family's Secret History (Borealis Books, $22.95), shows how 37 Irish-speaking families who emigrated from Connemara to Minnesota in 1880 were denigrated in the records kept by vested interests of Church and State, but vindicated by oral memories kept alive in Ireland.

Angela Bourke lectures in Irish at UCD. Her new book, Maeve Brennan of The New Yorker: A Life, will be published by Jonathan Cape in 2004

Cathal O'Searcaigh

Three books from the Irish-language publisher, Cló Iar-Chonnachta: Micheál Ó Conghaile is a latter-day Connemara surrealist, and in An Fear nach ndéanann Gáire (€15.99), a dazzling collection of short stories, he creates a mythical realm both intimate and cosmic, where psychodrama meets magic realism. Gabriel Rosenstock, our most prolific Irish language writer, is an expanding universe of words. His latest creation, Ólann mo Mhiúil as an nGainséis (€15.00), is a groundbreaking travel book which brilliantly catches his stir and sparkle as he freewheels his way around the world, divinely intoxicated by the light of other cultures. The jazzy urgency of Michael Davitt's poems, meanwhile, make Gaelic go be-bop in the night with a swinging self-confidence. Fardoras, (€10) his landmark new volume, merges craft and ardour with freshness and audacity.

Cathal Ó Searcaigh's collaboration with artist Marie Simonds-Gooding will open next month at An Gailearaí, Ceardlann na gCroisbealach in Falcarragh, Co Donegal. Seal in Neipeal, a travel book, will be published by Cló Iar-Chonnachta in February 2004

Paul Murray

I've just read Vernon God Little by D.B.C. Pierre (Faber, £14.99) and can confirm that everything you've heard is true: it's hilarious, tragic, wise, dumb, black, joyful. Ali Smith, meanwhile, just keeps getting better and better: The Whole Story and Other Stories (Hamish Hamilton, £10.99) is a gorgeous and seemingly effortless collection of beautiful, funny, moving stories. The book I've been waiting for all year is The Recognitions, the first novel by the late, great William Gaddis, finally reissued (by Atlantic, £10.99) after - scandalously - spending several years out of print. A labyrinthine tale of art forgery, this weighs in at nearly a thousand pages: a book to lose yourself in - though not, as Alan Partridge would say, to drop on your foot.

Paul Murray's début novel, An Evening of Long Goodbyes, published this year by Penguin, has been shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award, as well as for the Hughes & Hughes/Sunday Independent Irish Novel of the Year Award