How we made the list
Mindful of the knowledge that any verdict is only as trustworthy as the calibre of the jurors, I invited more than 60 authors, critics, academics, booksellers and festival curators to submit their 50 favourite Irish novels or short story collections of the century so far, either titles they loved or ones they felt were too significant to overlook.
To jog their memory, should they need it jogged, I sent them Neilsen’s list of the top 250 bestsellers in Ireland since 2000 and listed the many major domestic and international prizes Irish writers have won over the past 25 years, including four Booker Prizes, eight Costa/Nero awards; three Women’s Prizes for Fiction; four Walter Scott Prizes; and four International Dublin Literary Awards.
The results were collated into a list of the 100 most broadly popular titles, ranked in descending order based on the number of nominations each received.
[ The 100 best Irish books of the 21st century: No 100 to No 51Opens in new window ]
[ The 100 best Irish books of the 21st century: No 50 to No 26Opens in new window ]
[ The 100 best Irish books of the 21st century: No 25 to No 1Opens in new window ]
I then asked the panel to rank the titles from one to 100, to reflect their own personal preferences and thus to establish which books had inspired the deepest love.
The final result, given the size of the panel, was a surprisingly close-run thing, with only two ranking points separating the winner and the second-placed book.
Milkman by Anna Burns, which became a huge bestseller after winning the Booker Prize in 2018, was the first choice of 16 of our panel compared to only four for John McGahern’s sixth and final novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun, but his featured more consistently near the top of voters’ preferences.
What we learned
Fiction about the Northern conflict used to be regard as a turn-off for readers and publishers, yet at least seven on this list address it or its legacy.
That They May Face the Rising Sun came out in 2002, four years before McGahern’s death, and was published in the US as By the Lake. It won the inaugural Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year, which in turn inspired the much-expanded Irish Book Awards.
The risk that it might suffer from recency bias, more than two decades after its publication, was perhaps offset by Pat Collins’s much-loved film adaptation in 2023. It is striking how important Irish fiction is as an inspiration for film and TV adaptations, with a dozen of these already on the screen and half as many again in the pipeline.
Some 23 titles were from the first decade, 53 from the second and 24 from the current decade.
There is only one title by a writer of colour, This Hostel Life by Melatu Uche Okorie, which suggests that publishers need to do more to reflect Ireland’s changing demographic
Kevin Barry had the most titles in the top 100 with five, followed by Anne Enright and Colm Tóibín (four), and Claire Keegan, Sally Rooney, Joseph O’Connor and Sebastian Barry (three).
The female-male split was 54-46, which suggests that the male-dominated Irish canon is no more. There is only one title by a writer of colour, This Hostel Life by Melatu Uche Okorie, which suggests that publishers need to do more to reflect Ireland’s changing demographic.
The influence of two small Irish publishers, Tramp Press and Stinging Fly, is striking. Between them they have 10 titles in the top 100. Ten short story collections are included, a sign of their enduring popularity here.
Lists always generate points of contention. The 21st century technically started on January 1st, 2001 but I was willing to include 2020 titles. Someone queried Maggie O’Farrell’s inclusion but, although she grew up in Britain, she was born in Derry to Irish parents. More reasonably, a few questioned whether A Ghost in the Throat is fiction. I considered it nonfiction but its publisher Tramp Press called it “a fluid hybrid of essay and autofiction” and it was shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize for debut novels.
Is a list even a list without controversial omissions? Bestselling authors such as Cecelia Ahern (PS I Love you) and Graham Norton (Holding) did not make the cut and nor did John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Liz Nugent is the only crime writer featured. I would have expected at least Tana French to be there too but while she got a lot of votes, they were almost equally divided among her many titles. Similarly, Paul Howard would have benefited from vote management as his popularity was dissipated over numerous books in his bestselling Ross O’Carroll-Kelly series.
I hope that you will agree that the list is an impressive one, which will guide and encourage readers to discover some for the first time.
Panel of experts
Paul Howard, Clíodhna Ní Anluain, John Self, Fintan O’Toole, Cormac Kinsella, Eugene O’Brien, Claire Hennessy, Henrietta McKervey, Frank Shovlin, Julia Kelly, Peter Murphy, Martina Devlin, Colm Tóibín, Anne Enright, Michael Cronin, Julian Girdham, Eamon Maher, Lucy Sweeney Byrne, John Boyne, Neil Hegarty, Helen Cullen, Alex Clark, Val Nolan, Patricia Scanlan, Sarah Gilmartin, Diarmaid Ferriter, Niamh Donnelly, Bert Wright, Tomás Kenny, Fiona Reddan, Rónán Hession, Patricia Craig, Jessica Doyle, Vivienne Guinness, Emer McLysaght, Martin Doyle, Nadine O’Regan, Patrick Freyne, Róisín Ingle, Bernice Harrison, Peter O’Connell, Declan Burke, Eimear O’Herlihy, Eithne Shortall, Rosita Boland, Kevin Power, Sian Smyth, Caoilfhionn Fay, Colum McCann, Joseph O’Connor, Garrett Carr, Margaret Kelleher, Anne Griffin, Eilis Ní Dhuibhne, Sebastian Barry, Edel Coffey, Sinéad Mac Aodha, Susan Walsh, Hugh Linehan, Sinead McCorry, Rick O’Shea, Louisa Earls.
Data analysis: Cathal Stack
