Living in England, it sometimes feels to me that, at any given moment, I have twenty or so books being promoted as ‘MUST READS’ by Waterstones and Amazon and almost none of them are by Irish writers. So, as today is St. Patrick’s Day, I’d like to share with you five books by Irish writers that are on my Wishlist for 2024. I hope at least one of them tempts you.
One winter morning on an ordinary day in contemporary Dublin, an ordinary middle-class woman wakes up in her ordinary suburban home. Her husband is next to her in bed, her teenage children sleeping nearby.
Without thinking much about it, she walks out the front door and never comes back.
She travels first by car, then train, then ferry. Along the way, she finds herself in service stations and shopping centres, hotel bars and hairdressers – and in the beds of strange men.
Finally, forty-eight hours later, alone in a cottage in Wales, the woman faces up to what she has been ignoring inside herself, her family, modern society: signs of breakdown.
As the waves crash on to a wild Atlantic beach, Lou is at a crossroads. For the first time ever, just giving up seems like an option.
In just one night, at her own 50th birthday, her world has imploded. Her mother has kept a secret hidden all her life. And it changes everything. Before Lou can take another step, she needs to get to the bottom of the shocking truth that alters who she really is.
Along with her sister, Toni, who is facing her own crisis, the two women sets out on a life-changing journey – one that will take them through Ireland’s wildest coastline and to Sicily’s sun-baked rocky shores. It will also take Lou deep into her relationships with her mother, her sister and her daughter to figure out how to stop pleasing everyone else – and carve out who she really wants to be.
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist.
Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and when her husband disappears, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a society that is quickly unravelling.
How far will she go to save her family? And what – or who – is she willing to leave behind?
The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under – but rather than face the music, he’s spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman.
His wife Imelda is selling off her jewellery on eBay while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way to her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home.
Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favour to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil?
Can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written – is there still time to find a happy ending?
Grace Murphy doesn’t seem like the type of woman who’d have a man cable-tied to a chair, slowly dying in her house. She keeps to herself and goes through life working as a barista, and caring for her sister, showing her the love they never had as children . . .
Police officer Jerry Hughes knows about Grace’s brutal and troubled childhood; his own life was deeply affected by it.
Jerry still checks in on the sisters from time to time. But recently he’s been distracted by work. Men are going missing—and they seem to have nothing in common except for an uncanny physical resemblance to someone from Grace Murphy’s dark past . . .
Mike Finn's Fiction 
Good shout Mike, I like the sound of several of those and look forward to the reviews.
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Thank you and happy St. Patrick’s Day.
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