Forgotten Irish classics: 16 books that deserve to be better known

Driftwood from Scandinavia by Lady Wilde (1884)

Chosen by Michael Cronin

“I should like to rage through life – this orthodox creeping is too tame for me – ah this wild rebellious nature of mine.” This is Jane Francesca Elgee, later known as Lady Wilde, and mother of Oscar, writing to a friend in December 1848. Translator, poet (under the pseudonym “Speranza”), nationalist activist and feminist precursor, she was a keen traveller. Driftwood from Scandinavia recounts her trip to Sweden in 1856, which brought her through England, Germany and Denmark. Gloriously opinionated, frank, irreverent, vivid, her travel writing is a timely reminder of the many forgotten literary gems we owe to Ireland’s travellers, from Sydney Owenson and Lady Blessington to Monk Gibbon and Sean O’Faolain.

Michael Cronin’s latest work is Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene

Poor Women! by Norah Hoult (1928)

Chosen by Louise Kennedy

Norah Hoult (1898-1984) published 28 books during her life. My favourite was her first, a collection of short stories entitled, Poor Women! The exclamation mark is telling. Each story is named for its female protagonist and is a snapshot of her at a precarious moment, yet Hoult has no truck with self-pity. In a note about the text, she says she is concerned with “unsupported” women. Ethel uses the death of their son to manipulate her estranged husband; elderly Miss Jocelyn leaves her tiny flat to live with relatives who don’t want or even like her; widowed Mrs Johnson takes to the streets to earn rent money. Hoult’s gaze is unforgiving – her prose sparkling with period detail and emotional insight.

Louise Kennedy’s latest work is Trespasses

On Another Man’s Wound by Ernie O’Malley (1936)

Chosen by Darran Anderson

One of the disgraces of our time is our ability to abstract, erase, applaud and exploit human suffering, often for personal gain and from a safe distance. By contrast, Ernie O’Malley’s On Another Man’s Wound is a gripping immediate account of armed struggle, from Ireland’s revolutionary years, that does not shy away from what violence actually means. Immersive, brutal, elegiac, destructive, principled, ignoble. Life as it is, not as we wish it to be. “I have the bad and disagreeable habit of writing the truth as I see it,” O’Malley claimed, and they are truths he does not necessarily wish to find. We could do with such bad and disagreeable habits now.

Darran Anderson’s latest work is Inventory

I Did Penal Servitude by D.83222 (Walter Mahon-Smith) (1945)

Chosen by Brian Dillon

“A middle-aged man appearing from nowhere must have a background somewhere.” Walter Mahon-Smith was convicted in Mayo of embezzlement, and served his three-year sentence in Sligo, Portlaoise and Mountjoy prisons. Following his release, he began writing about his experiences for The Bell – the pen-name “D.83222″ was not Mahon-Smith’s prison ID, but Seán Ó Faoláin’s phone number. Ó Faoláin supplied a preface to I Did Penal Servitude: “This is the first book of its kind to appear in Ireland, one of the most unaffected and sincere of its kind that I have read.” The shame of incarceration, the prison conditions then prevailing, the atmosphere among inmates on the day of a hanging: Mahon-Smith conveys all of this and more. There is some controversy over whether his book influenced Boys Town founder Father Edward J Flanagan in his condemnation of Irish carceral institutions. I Did Penal Servitude sat for years on my Garda-sergeant grandfather’s bookshelves; he was a hard man, and I hope it softened his heart a bit.

Brian Dillon’s latest work is Affinities

Igaliko: Baile beag sa Ghraonlainn by Karin and Hans Berg, translated by Eoghan Ó Colla (1976)

Igaliko: Baile beag sa Ghraonlainn by arin and Hans Berg, translated by Eoghan Ó Colla (1976)

Chosen by Nuala O’Connor

As a kid, my friend’s Da worked for Oifig an tSoláthair (the publications branch of the Department of Education), which meant I got to share in a wealth of Irish language children’s books. Igaliko is one I’ve kept to this day – it’s a beautifully illustrated story about farmers in Greenland. The setting was exotic to me, even though the scenery and some of the activities – sheepshearing, saving hay – were similar to those of Connemara, where we spent summer holidays. But it was wintry Igaliko that really enchanted: children skating on frozen seas; a purple storm that ripped the roof off a barn; food transported by sled from ships that broke through ice. Igaliko is a gorgeous, simple, stirring book, and just seeing it on my shelf makes me happy.

Nuala O’Connor’s new novel Seaborne is published in April

States of Mind: a Study of Anglo-Irish conflict 1780-1980 by Oliver MacDonagh (1983)

Chosen by Roy Foster

Oliver MacDonagh was a formidable and subtly unconventional historian, probably best remembered for his biography of Daniel O’Connell and probing studies of 19th-century government. But his most original book was States of Mind: a study of Anglo-Irish conflict 1780-1980, which compressed a series of brilliant insights into a brief space. Rather than rehearsing directly the disasters and confrontations of Britain’s governance of Ireland, MacDonagh’s beautifully written essays took an oblique approach to the psychological differences between English and Irish world-views, zeroing in on abstract concepts such as time, space and property, as well as the imbalances of power; his lapidary conclusion highlighted “the terrible constancy in being vulnerable”. Like FSL Lyons’s Culture and Anarchy in Ireland 1890-1939, and with a similar trenchant economy, MacDonagh’s book explored and illuminated the cultural basis of politics. It was ahead of its time 40 years ago, and in some ways still is.

Roy Foster’s latest work is On Seamus Heaney

A Woman To Blame: The Kerry Babies Case by Nell McCafferty (1985)

Chosen by Edel Coffey

When I worked as a cub reporter in the Sunday Tribune in the year 2000, Nell McCafferty was their star columnist. She appeared once a week for editorial meetings, a cigarette jammed into the corner of her mouth like a rock star. She has since somewhat fallen out of the public consciousness and deserves to be better remembered for her social journalism and activism, but particularly for her reporting on the Kerry Babies story, which was later published as the book A Woman To Blame: The Kerry Babies Case. McCafferty’s instinctive understanding of injustice (she grew up on Derry’s Bogside) is met here with a clarity of insight into Ireland’s breathtaking misogyny of the time. It’s an era-defining historical document.

Edel Coffey’s latest book is In Her Place

The Hounds of the Morrigan by Pat O’Shea (1985)

Chosen by Anna Carey

This is probably the greatest Irish children’s book ever written. It was certainly the first Irish book I ever loved. In the 1980s, there were comparatively few Irish children’s books; my favourite books were all set in countries I had never seen. And then, in 1988, aged 12, I read The Hounds of the Morrigan. The story of Galway boy Pidge and his hilariously bold sister Brigit, who find themselves caught up in a battle between ancient good and evil, was exactly my sort of thing: firmly set in the real world, but full of utterly convincing, wild magic and very funny. Inexplicably, it’s currently out of print.

Anna Carey’s adaptation of her novel The Making of Mollie has just completed its run at the Ark, Dublin

The Disappearance of Rory Brophy by Carl Lombard (1992)

Chosen by John Boyne

For my 21st birthday in 1992, a friend gave me a copy of The Disappearance of Rory Brophy, a debut novel by Carl Lombard. This comic novel’s central character was the sort of boy I wanted to be: one who jumps from a bridge but whose suicide is averted by landing on a truck filled with fruit, leading to an unexpected trip to Sweden where adventure, sex and dramatic entanglements ensue. Lombard published a second novel, Mortal Beings, a year later, but since then – silence. The disappearance of Carl Lombard is one that continues to mystify me. It would be nice to hear his voice again.

John Boyne’s new novel Earth is out next month

The Four Masters by Michael Mullen (1992)

Chosen by Catherine Dunne

Michael Mullen, who died on February 17th, 2024, was a respected historian and a much-loved author of children’s books. He was well-known in the 1980s and ‘90s, and it was a source of grief to him that his work faded into obscurity. Brilliant at capturing the kind of detail that brought history alive for children, his The Four Masters (1992) is a captivating account of the arrival in 1632 of four scholars to a Franciscan settlement on the Donegal-Leitrim border. A sea-captain and his daughter befriend the four, who face many challenges as they endeavour to write the history of Ireland.

Catherine Dunne’s latest novel, A Good Enough Mother, winner of the Rapallo Prize for Fiction 2023, will be published by Betimes Books later this year

The Dispossessed by Robert McLiam Wilson and Donovan Wylie (1992)

Chosen by Caroline Magennis

In 1992, novelist Robert McLiam Wilson and photographer Donovan Wylie collaborated on a non-fiction book, The Dispossessed. Featuring interviews, cutting commentary and photography, it is a searing portrayal of life in London, Glasgow and Belfast after more than a decade of Tory rule. The tone is, justifiably, furious, but the stories of those at the margins of society are told with great sympathy and clarity. The physical and mental consequences of endemic poverty are so vividly described that this important book has clear resonances for Britain and Ireland in the age in austerity and the cost-of-living crisis.

Caroline Magennis is the author of Harpy: A Manifesto for Childfree Women, out with Icon Books in May

Eureka Street by Robert McLiam Wilson (1996)

Chosen by Helen Cullen

Robert McLiam Wilson’s third novel, Eureka Steet, topped the best-seller lists in Ireland and the UK when it was released, before being adapted for a BBC TV series. The Belfast-born writer was also named by Granta magazine in their illustrious Best of Young British Novelists list. And yet, 20 years later, this provocative, satirical, lyrical work that claimed in its subtitle to be “A Novel of Ireland Like No Other” seems to have dissolved from public consciousness. Set in the 1990s, the author juxtaposes the comedic romance of two young men (one Catholic, one Protestant) looking for love in Belfast against a city in a permanent state of flux, instability and violence. It is extraordinary in its literary power to provoke the imagination, empathy and ethical consideration of the reader. McLiam Wilson offers an unsentimental lens through which to view these complex individuals that expresses the political situation with great narrative ingenuity. In this golden age of Northern Ireland literature, a return to Eureka Street feels timely.

Helen Cullen’s latest novel is The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually

The Visitor by Maeve Brennan (2001)

Chosen by Sinéad Gleeson

Maeve Brennan’s short stories and non-fiction were republished in recent years by The Stinging Fly and Peninsula Press, and are the bedrock of her literary reputation. Her only long work is a novella, The Visitor, published posthumously by New Island in 2001, which feels alarmingly timely. Anastacia returns to Ireland after her mother’s death to reconnect with her paternal grandmother. The strained relationship is the nucleus of a book that’s orbited by themes of belonging, loneliness and what it means to have a home. It’s a sharp, sour read, especially against the backdrop of the current housing and homelessness crisis.

Sinéad Gleeson’s debut novel Hagstone is published next month

12:23 by Eoin MacNamee (2007)

Chosen by Kevin Power

Eoin MacNamee’s 12:23 got a chilly reception from the UK press when it was published – perhaps understandably. Twenty-three minutes past midnight was the moment the Mercedes carrying Diana, Princess of Wales, crashed in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris on August 31st, 1997; McNamee’s novel is about a conspiracy (strobe lights, orders from on high) to bring the crash about. McNamee has often quoted Don DeLillo to the effect that what intrigues him about a subject is “the sinister buzz of implication”; whether or not you think there was a conspiracy to murder Diana (and there almost certainly wasn’t) is beside the point. 12:23 is a novel that, in common with much of McNamee’s fiction, uses the seamy end of a seamy business – “intelligence,” aka spying, aka covert ops – as an image of the systems that shape our world in hidden ways. There are lines in this seriously underrated book that I can quote from memory: for example Harper, the jaded Special Branch man, meditating on how the French do airports, “the way they took responsibility for the lyric matter of flying”. More people should know this novel.

Kevin Power’s latest work is White City

Gone to Earth by Maurice Leitch (2019)

Chosen by Neil Hegarty

In Gone to Earth, a fugitive hides – 12 years and counting – in a house in small-town Spain. It is the 1950s, Franco is dominant, and Diego was on the losing side in the civil war – and he isn’t alone in his isolation: the town is inhabited by other lonely misfits burdened by history. The lesson of this brooding, atmospheric novel is that it’s impossible to escape the past, and futile to seek to do so. This is the final novel we have from Maurice Leitch, who died in 2023: it, like all of his writing, deserves to be better known.

Neil Hegarty’s latest book is Impermanence, edited with Nora Hickey M’Sichili

Minds Of Winter by Ed O’Loughlin (2016)

Chosen by Eoin McNamee

You’d scarcely call it an historical novel, but the lost of history wander its frozen landscapes. Nazi meteorologists and indigenous bone tribes, doomed polar expeditions and cold war listening stations. A spirit child unveiled in a seance in Victorian Derry finds resonance in the Inuit belief that the Northern Lights are dead children at play. Lovers meet in the polar wastes looking for an answer to family mysteries and have transcendence thrust upon them. When one of them puts his ear to the great dish of a Russian early warning system he is listening not for radio chatter but for the voices of the dead. You cannot but be haunted by them.

The Bureau, Eoin McNamee’s new novel, will be published next year