Anne Enright
Question 7 by Richard Flanagan is one of those books where a writer bundles up his entire life and hurls it on to the page. I also loved Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood and The Safekeep by Yael Van der Wouden, which is brilliant on withheld rage and desire. I can join the groundswell of praise for another passionate and distinctive debut, Ferdia Lennon’s Glorious Exploits. The book I found most eye-opening was Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI by Madhumita Murgia, which tells you everything you don’t want to know (but really should) about data tech.
- Anne Enright’s latest novel is The Wren, The Wren
John Boyne
My book of the year is Small Rain by Garth Greenwell, one of the US’s finest novelists. He found himself doubled over in pain in a non-Covid-related incident during the pandemic, which led to a prolonged hospital stay. His affliction baffled doctors so much that he became a person of interest to medics of all disciplines. While they seek ways to treat him, Greenwell veers between stoicism, fear, missing his beloved partner, and worrying about his home. Rarely has illness made for such a compelling read.
- John Boyne’s latest novel is Fire
Sarah Moss
End times bring out greatness in some writers. Kathleen Jamie published a new essay collection, Cairn (I feel this should be all one needs to say, but if you haven’t read her, do). The best writing about the domestic arts is always also writing about resistance to despair: I recommend Caroline Eden’s Cold Kitchen for culinary meditations from a war correspondent. Lara Pawson’s Spent Light, disturbing and funny hybrid prose, has stayed with me since I read it last spring. I enjoyed the Shetland poet Jen Hadfield’s beautifully-crafted memoir, Storm Pegs.
- Sarah Moss’s latest book is My Good Bright Wolf: A Memoir
Joseph O’Connor
Niamh Mulvey’s debut novel The Amendments is a fine achievement from a writer of rare gifts. Every novel by Donal Ryan extends his deserved reputation; I adored his Heart, Be at Peace. I’ve loved John Cooper Clarke’s poems and performances since first encountering them as a teenager; his 2024 collection, What, is brilliant. My book of the year is Joe Boyd’s And the Roots of Rhythm Remain: a wonderfully knowledgeable and discursive travelogue of world music, detailed, loving, incisive and beautifully written. Jack Fennell’s anthology of lost Irish ghost stories, Your Own Dark Shadow, is a knockout.
- Joseph O’Connor’s novel The Ghosts of Rome, a sequel to My Father’s House, is published in January
Mark O’Connell
Hari Kunzru is, I think, a weirdly underrated writer. It’s not that he’s ignored – far from it, he’s very successful, and has been for many years now. But I think the extent to which his fiction plumbs the depths of our terminal-stage capitalist malaise, while also being compulsively entertaining, deserves to have a lot more fuss made of it. Blue Ruin is the third in his “Three Colours” trilogy, following White Tears and the incredible Red Pill. It has a thrillerish pace, and a cold-blooded intellectualism reminiscent of mid-period Don DeLillo.
- Mark O’Connell’s latest book is A Thread of Violence
Kit de Waal
My book of the year is Donal Ryan’s Heart, Be at Peace. Ryan has a way of getting a whole character and a whole life down on a few pages, sometimes a few paragraphs. In overlapping and intertwined voices, we’re picking up where his previous masterpiece The Spinning Heart left off. Is it possible to say a work of fiction is true? Well, this is and once again, it’s a book that stays with you well beyond the last page.
- Kit de Waal’s new novel, The Best if Everything, is out next April
Diarmaid Ferriter
Donal Ryan’s Heart, Be at Peace is enthralling. He captures such a range of emotion, defiance, eloquence, crudity and dark humour, in brilliant prose that makes him stand out in a crowded and rich Irish literary space. Patrick Joyce’s Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanishing World gives agency to the people of the land as he excavates the peasant experiences across Europe, placing the Irish dimension and his personal connection to it in a broader context. Given the dark politics of this year, Richard Slotkin’s A Great Disorder is a timely and textured reminder of the exploitation of national myths and how and why the US is so divided.
- Diarmaid Ferriter’s latest book is The Revelation of Ireland 1995-2020
Julia Kelly
Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst is my book of the year. Reading his prose is like sinking into a bath of the perfect temperature, with his exquisite use of language and extraordinary powers of description. I also loved All Fours by Miranda July, a wild, bawdy, horny, hilarious escape from the reality of a menopausal wife and mother into an alternative fantasy, an existence where she can express her sexual and artistic desires with unfettered freedom.
- Julia Kelly’s fourth book, Still, will be published next September
Malachy Clerkin
The Racket by Conor Niland and Gavin Cooney is a fantastic – and deservedly prize-winning – trek through the nearly-but-not-quite backroads of professional tennis. Obsessed by Johnny Sexton and Peter O’Reilly is a laudably searching examination of the psyche of one of Ireland’s greatest ever sportspeople. States of Play by Miguel Delaney paints a detailed and often grotesque picture of how soccer has found itself hijacked by money and sportswashing. Finally, My Story by Joe Canning and Vincent Hogan is full of searing insights into the Galway hurler’s life less ordinary.
- Malachy Clerkin is an Irish Times sports reporter
Fintan O’Toole
In a year stained by such widespread indifference to extreme violence against civilians in war, Cormac Ó Gráda’s The Hidden Victims: Civilian Casualties of the Two World Wars stood out as a work of great moral as well as of historical importance. One of Ireland’s greatest historians scrupulously sifts the evidence from the first and second World Wars and their “collateral damage” of genocide, famine, aerial bombing and disease. His conclusion is startling: he estimates that the wars cost not the previously accepted 35 million but 65 million civilian lives – nearly two-thirds of the 100 million total killed. Ó Gráda writes with immense care, eschewing rhetoric or appeals to the emotions, but there is always the sense that this quiet precision is an act of mourning for 30 million people who were not even given the dignity of becoming statistics. The resonances for the present are profound: this book is a potent warning against amnesia and evasion.
- Fintan O’Toole’s latest book is Shakespeare Is Hard, But so Is Life
Sarah Gilmartin
Holly Pester’s debut The Lodgers is a bracing, eloquent dissection of a generation priced out of their own home. Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst examines race, class, sexuality and identity in a narrative suffused with loss and longing. Three gems from the Booker longlist: Wild Houses by Colin Barrett, Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel, Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner. Three intricate, and very different, story collections: Barcelona by Mary Costello, Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong, Openings by Lucy Caldwell. And for poetry fans, the moving All the Good Things You Deserve by Elaine Feeney.
- Sarah Gilmartin’s latest novel is Service
Brian Hanley
It has been a depressing year, which perhaps influences these choices. Some impressive new histories illuminated the 20th century’s myriad tragedies; betrayed revolutionary hopes in Maurice Casey’s Hotel Lux, murder gangs and state collusion in Edward Burke’s Ghosts of A Family, despotic political “saviours” in Aidan Beatty’s The Party Is Always Right. The fictionalised corruption brought to life in Joe Thomas’s Red Menace, his follow-up to the excellent White Riot, seems almost benign in comparison.
- Brian Hanley is assistant professor of history at Trinity College Dublin
Sally Hayden
I read mostly older books this year, but a few new ones that I definitely recommend are Scattered by Aamna Mohdin, a Somali-British journalist whose 2015 reporting trip to Calais prompts exploration as to the journey her own family undertook to escape Somalia: The Tale of a Wall, a memoir by Nasser Abu Srour, a Palestinian who has spent decades in Israeli prison; and Chukwuebuka Ibeh’s Blessings, a moving novel about queer lives in Nigeria.
- Sally Hayden is the author of My Fourth Time, We Drowned, and writes from the Middle East and Africa for The Irish Times
Donal Fallon
The Irish in the Resistance by Clodagh Finn and John Morgan is a brilliant achievement, bringing to light new stories of men and women who risked everything during the second World War. While Samuel Beckett’s role in the French Resistance is well documented (it was considerably more than what he dismissed as “boy scout stuff”), many of the names in this book will be entirely new to the reader. Great archival digging and lots of heart.
- Donal Fallon is the presenter of the Three Castles Burning podcast
Sara Keating
It’s impossible to choose, but as the shortest day of the year approaches, I am reminded of two of the best children’s books of 2024: the fantastic non-fiction Solstice: The Longest, Shortest Day by Jen Breach (5+) and Eilish Fisher’s stunning Fia and the Last Snow Deer, featuring writing and illustrations of equal beauty. For a greater understanding of how we know what we know, Chris Haughton’s The History of Information (7+) is both eye-catching and essential. Finally, Vicky Cowie’s Tales from Muggleswick Wood (3+) is a bedtime treasury narrated by a grandmother with whimsical watercolours from Charlie Macksey, which will be beloved on bookshelves for generations.
- Sara Keating is a cultural journalist, with a special interest in children’s books
Paul Muldoon
Missing Persons, or My Grandmother’s Secrets, by Clair Wills, is a book that will secure a place in the annals of 20th-century Irish social history as firmly as Twenty Years A-Growing by Maurice O’Sullivan or Heinrich Böll’s Irish Journal. This account of a cover-up within a single family resonates with a capacity to look away that too often seems to be a national characteristic. One consequence of this book might be to further tip the scales and allow us to overcome our reluctance to send the Catholic Church packing, as we would any other multinational with a comparable history of dodgy behaviour.
- Paul Muldoon’s latest work is Joy in Service on Rue Tagore
Claire Adam
My Dear Kabul by an Afghan women’s writing group is an absolute gem of a memoir that deserves a place on your bookshelf and in your heart. The authors are 21 Afghan women writing secretly to each other in real time, often in WhatsApp messages, as they live through the country’s fall to the Taliban in 2021. The very act of writing is dangerous, but they’re driven by an urgent need to connect – with each other and the outside world – even as the walls close in on them.
- Claire Adam is the author of Golden Child. Her next novel, Love Forms, will be published next June
Paul Howard
Our London Lives by Christine Dwyer Hickey is a masterpiece. It’s the story of two teenage Irish emigrants living in London in 1979. Milly in a runaway from judgmental, Catholic Ireland. Pip is a young boxing hopeful with a taste for the sauce. The novel tells the story of their fleeting romance and then the stories of their occasionally interweaving lives over the course of the four decades that follow. It’s dark and heartbreaking. Beautiful storytelling by a master of the genre.
Paul Howard’s latest book is the Ross O’Carroll-Kelly novel Don’t Look Back in Ongar
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne
Jan Carson, Quickly, While They Still Have Horses, is an outstanding collection of witty short stories set in – and satirising – the North of Ireland. I loved Percival Everett’s James, and also Sarah Moss’s memoir focusing on anorexia, My Good Bright Wolf. My great friends Liz McManus, Mary Rose Callaghan, Phyl Herbert, Catherine Dunne, Celia de Freine, Evelyn Conlon and Mícheál Ó Conghaile all published wonderful books during the year. They are a productive bunch!
- Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s latest book, edited with Michaela Schage Frueh, is Well! You Don’t Look It: Women Writers in Ireland Reflect on Ageing
Paul Murray
Ali Smith’s miraculous Gliff is at once a pitch-black take on the authoritarian future and a tender, hilarious and ultimately uplifting portrait of two young sisters as they battle to escape it. Full of jokes and wordplay, kindness and connection – the eponymous Gliff is a horse the girls rescue from an abattoir – it’s part novel, part resistance manual, facing into the darkness while showing a path to redemption. A ray of hope after a year like this one.
- Paul Murray’s latest novel is The Bee Sting
Mia Levitin
Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep, sexy and twisty without sacrificing substance, is a marvel. Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings made me weep buckets of tears, and I was in the chorus of accolades for Percival Everett’s National Book Award-winning James. Hattie Crisell’s In Writing is chock-full of insights about not only writing but life. And more than just a survey, Sam Leith’s The Haunted Wood is a tribute to the enduring importance of children’s literature.
- Mia Levitin is a critic and author of The Future of Seduction
John Self
In a good year, Hisham Matar’s My Friends and Sunjeev Sahota’s The Spoiled Heart were superb personal-political novels that should have won all the awards. Alba Arikha’s Two Hours is a brief and gripping story of a woman’s real and imagined lives. And if you like Damon Galgut’s clear-eyed, unsentimental stories of South Africa, try both Karen Jennings’s Crooked Seeds and SJ Naudé's Fathers and Fugitives. They bowled me over. Outside novels, Mary Costello’s Barcelona was my story collection of the year.
- John Self is a book reviewer. He lives in Belfast
Edel Coffey
The one that really stands out for me is Ferdia Lennon’s charismatic debut, Glorious Exploits, a brilliant and original novel set in ancient Syracuse but told in a contemporary Dublin vernacular. Original, profound and funny. Chris Whitaker’s All The Colours of the Dark was a hugely enjoyable saga, part-love story, part-crime novel. Olivia Laing’s The Garden against Time was a brilliantly researched and deeply enjoyable examination of how we share the planet, and hybrid memoir. And an honourable mention must go to Miranda July’s All Fours, which was an eye-popping novel that fearlessly explored the painful process of ageing as a Gen X woman.
- Edel Coffey’s latest novel is In Her Place
Martin Doyle
Ferdia Lennon’s Glorious Exploits is a marvellous feat of imagination, set in ancient Sicily, but with Barrytown accents. Intermezzo by Sally Rooney is perceptive and precise, her best yet. The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes sparkles with intelligence and wit. Niamh Mulvey’s The Amendments is a warm evocation of Irish women coming of age in a cold social climate. Kevin Barry’s The Heart in Winter is a joyous, riotous Irish western. Colin Barrett’s Wild Houses captures Ireland’s own wild west.
Martin Doyle is Books Editor of The Irish Times and author of Dirty Linen
Claire Hennessy
Margaret McDonald’s touching debut, Glasgow Boys, deftly explores male friendship in and out of the care system. Kathleen Glasgow’s The Glass Girl skilfully and sympathetically tackles addiction and self-worth. Jenny Valentine’s Us in the Before and After haunts in a variety of ways; Jandy Nelson’s dreamy When the World Tips Over is a spun-sugar treat. Claire Furniss’s The Things We Leave Behind and Moira Buffini’s Songlight remind us dystopian futures are always relevant.
Claire Hennessy is a writer and book critic
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Jan Carson
It’s always brilliant when the book you’ve been most looking forward lives up to all your expectations, and A Sunny Place for Shady People, Argentinian writer Mariana Enriquez’s second collection of short stories translated into English, expertly, by Megan McDowell, more than met my sky-high hopes. These stories are dark, macabre, occasionally absurd, sometimes funny and always, always, so deftly written they’ll literally haunt your dreams. I’m already counting the days down to Enriquez’s next publication.
- Jan Carson’s latest work is Quickly, While They Still Have Horses
Niamh Donnelly
With all the Sally Rooney discourse, it’s easy to forget how exquisite and immersive her writing is. Intermezzo, which follows two brothers after their father’s death, is her best, most sophisticated work yet. Tracing two interconnected lives, Christine Dwyer Hickey’s Our London Lives captures the London-Irish experience and the ache of missed opportunities. Maggie Armstrong’s voice leaps off the page in her debut story collection, Old Romantics, while Niamh Mulvey’s The Amendments is a wise and astute first novel.
- Niamh Donnelly is a critic and arts journalist
Tony Clayton-Lea
Belfast punk band Ruefrex is the subject of Wild Colonial Boys: A Belfast Punk Story by Thomas Paul Burgess, a scathing memoir by the band’s former drummer and songwriter. Under a Rock by Chris Stein is the Blondie guitarist’s frank account of a life far less ordinary than most. The best dip-into book is You Spin Me Round, a collection of essays by mostly Irish writers that present warmth, wit and sometimes weird outlooks on the profound importance of music.
- Tony Clayton-Lea writes on pop culture and the arts
Louise Kennedy
I have lately struggled to read fiction, perhaps because I am carrying my own novel-in-progress in my head. An exception is the marvellous Hagstone by Sinéad Gleeson, a gorgeous, haunting, intelligent tale set on a remote island. In Hereafter, poet Vona Groarke constructs the story of her ancestor, who emigrated to New York to work in domestic service. It destroyed me. And please read Woman of Winter, her retelling of the Hag of Beara. Edward Said’s reissued The Question of Palestine, a vital, seminal work, has never been more relevant.
- Louise Kennedy’s latest book is Trespasses
Michael Cronin
Phyllis Gaffney’s remarkable new book, Foreign Tongues: Victorian Language Learning and the Shaping of Modern Ireland, gives an account of the visionary women and men who laid the foundations for modern language learning in Ireland. This is a story that had never before been told. A scrupulously researched, compellingly written history of the institutional emergence of modern languages in Irish life, it fills a momentous gap in our knowledge of the languages that have shaped the fortunes of Irish society and culture in the 20th century and beyond.
- Michael Cronin is 1776 professor of French in Trinity College Dublin
