We were delighted by the response to our request to readers to let us know what their favourite books have been over the last year. It would have been great to publish all your recommendations, but that would have taken two or three pages. Instead we offer an edited selection - with thanks to everyone who contacted us by e-mail and post about the books that made them stop in their tracks in the year gone by Caroline Walsh Literary Editor
I feel in elevated company (Ruairi Quinn) with my choice of Snow by Orhan Pamuk (Faber), a book in time with Turkey hoping for EU membership. It shows insight into the Islamic world and all its issues, secular and religious - and its issues with the western world. Though I enjoyed his journey, I found the protagonist Ka at times frustrating - too much of a dreamer; I wanted to shake him. John Banville's The Sea (Picador) is very moving and at times upsetting - a compelling read. Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (Faber), on the other hand, was a disturbing read; I did not warm to any of the characters - am I on my own? Glad I read it, though.
Paula Kelly
Dublin18
Merchant Prince by Thomas McCarthy (Anvil Press Poetry) is a beautifully written book which combines poetry with a strong narrative. Set in the 18th and 19th centuries, it tells the story of a young man from Cork's merchant class who moves to Rome to study for the priesthood in Rome's Irish College. The boy's vocation is severely tested as he finds himself caught up in the extravagance of Rome's upper-class society. He abandons his calling, and upon hearing of the collapse of his family's fortunes back in Cork, returns to his native city to become, eventually, one of the merchant princes of that city. The book contains translations of the works of some of the Italian poets, as well as being illustrated throughout with black-and-white reproductions from old Irish ballad sheets and 18th century prints, making it not only a pleasure to read, but also a pleasure to look at.
Phil Young
Dublin 18
The Known World by Edward P Jones (Harper Perennial) is a marvellous read from beginning to end. The novel is set in Virginia in the 1860s and tells the story of the black slaves in the ownership of a black plantation owner in Manchester County. A wonderful story, well-written with great descriptions of the characters, black and white, slave and free, the land and the social history at that time.
Mary Flanagan
Limerick City
I read Living on the Seabed by Lindsay Nicholson (Vermilion) several times and each time learned something from it. While it is primarily about bereavement, it is also about love: love between husband and wife; love of a mother for two beautiful daughters; and love of life. Nicholson, a courageous woman, describes her marriage to Observer journalist John Merriot, the birth of their first daughter Eleanor, John's battle with leukaemia, his death, the birth of their second daughter Hope, and then, six years later, the death of Eleanor from leukaemia also. Her remarkable descriptive powers come into play as she describes how she coped with grief, depression, being a lone parent and trying to hold down a job. What comes across, however, is what a loving environment she created for her daughters. This book is not just about death. It is a testimony to the infinite resilience of the human spirit in the face of terrible tragedy. Anyone would benefit from reading it.
Kevin O'Byrne
Skibbereen, Co Cork
Three home-grown books on three short-lived figures whose cultural identity in Ireland has been overlooked - Cork came up trumps at the end of its special year. Apart from the Crawford Gallery's lavish James Barry catalogue, the long-dormant Cork Public Museum has magnificently re-surfaced with two superbly designed catalogues to mark two small but major exhibitions: Conserving the Dream: Treasures of St Fin Barre's Cathedral, edited by Richard Wood, marking William Burges's brilliance as a master designer-architect, and Joseph Higgins: Sculptor and Painter 1885-1925 edited by Orla Murphy, which reveals an assured yet poignantly skilled artist. The Woodfield Press in Dublin reproduced the defiantly languorous Sadhbh Trinseach, dressed in brilliant blue Gaelic Revival garb, on the cover of Cesca's Diary 1913-1916: Where Art and Nationalism Meet edited by Hilary Pyle (see main photograph). This invaluable first-hand account of the political and cultural engagement in militant yet romantic Ireland by a young, passionately zealous, intelligent and artistic Anglo-Irish idealist is a rare treat.
Nicola Gordon Bowe
NCAD, Dublin 8
Cesca's Diary 1913-1916: Where Art and Nationalism Meet, edited by Hilary Pyle (The Woodfield Press), is the story of Ireland's lost artist Cesca Chenevix Trench, who died tragically in the 1918 Spanish flu at twenty-seven years old. She happens to be my great-aunt. The book, with colour plates of Cesca's artistic work and fine drawings of people and places, is a remarkable testimony to a young girl's love for her family, even as she broke with their Unionist attitudes and became a vigorous nationalist. Cesca's whole adult life challenged her Ascendancy background. Pyle's magnificent achievement is to have pieced together a diary left in fragments, to have translated many passages in Irish or French and to have woven a fascinating narrative. Many will want to read about this girl who went to the GPO on the Tuesday of Easter week and remonstrated with Patrick Pearse about a Rising which sought everything she longed for but which she saw as fatally mistimed.
Anthony Fletcher
Oxfordshire, England
The Height of Nonsense by Paul Clements (Collins Press) is an extremely funny account of a meandering journey around every county in Ireland. He sets off with childlike abandon and talks to a huge variety of people in pubs, cafes, post offices and in the hills themselves. His plan is to find the highest point in each county, but he often gets sidetracked and the result is a splendidly witty book. What I particularly liked is that he visited out-of-the-way places and gives as much time to Monaghan and Cavan as he does to Cork and my wife's home county of Donegal. I could see myself following in his footsteps. Still on a travel theme, my second recommendation is Grumpy Old Men - on Holiday by David Quantick (Harper Collins) - the perfect holiday book. I enjoyed it while caravanning in Italy this summer. It is a humorous look at holidays in which the author finds reason to complain about everything: the delays on the motorways, the hold-ups at the airport etc. He goes into great detail about what not to do on holiday and who to avoid. I could identify with the author - it was me - a middle-aged, not-so-grumpy old man on holiday. It was the perfect read, the book in one hand and a glass of Chianti in the other.
Keith Burnside
Comber, Co Down
In choosing The La Touche Family in Ireland by Michael McGinley (La Touche Legacy Committee, Greystones), I am driven by a compelling interest in one of the most significant Huguenot families to settle in 17th-century Ireland, at Marlay in Rathfarnham, Bellevue in Delgany and Harristown in Kilcullen.The author sets out a highly readable portrait of an intriguing and, at times, elusive family who, among other things, got banking off the ground in Dublin, contributing extensively to the social, religious, political and charitable life of 18th and 19th-century Ireland. McGinley tells their story with evident exhaustive research and a real feel for the people and their times. Having lived for more than 40 years across the road from Harristown, settled in retirement at La Touche Cottage in Brannockstown, I am drawn more deeply by this delightful book into the tragic saga of John Ruskin and Rose La Touche.
Robert Dunlop
Brannockstown, Co Kildare
The Sea by John Banville (Picador) is a moving study of loves lost and summers past, evoking the damp sands (and damper hands) of younger, sunnier seaside days when anything seemed possible. Banville mercilessly observes the agony of youth and the dull pain of growing old. Laced with self-lacerating humour, the book is a lyric on grief and death, the tide that comes in for us all. The King Of Suburbia by Iggy McGovern (Dedalus Press) is a wry and witty first collection of poems containing a satisfying mix of mordant aperçus on life among the wheelie-bins and grinning garden gnomes, alongside touching pieces about his father. Conor Brady's Up With The Times (Gill & Macmillan) chronicles the changing Ireland, viewed from the driver's window of a newspaper that was itself changing from an old-fashioned steam engine to a slick express train. All the main events are covered, as well as plenty of delightful titbits, told in an affable and immensely readable style.
John O'Donnell
Dublin 6
In the Shadow of the Ombu Tree by Hugh FitzGerald Ryan (Chaos Press) has a very interesting mix of Irish, Spanish and Uruguayan traditions and stories. It's the story of the author's ancestors, but also the story of thousands of people who came to Uruguay from many European countries in the 1800s. The book has special focus on a little town in the southwest of Uruguay called Santa Catalina, which still exists today; its name probably came from an ancestor of the author's.
William Revetria
Montevideo, Uruguay
"It's exactly like an Irish village where everybody knows everybody else," says Rose in The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt (Spectre). She should know, having lived in Venice for nearly 30 years. Berendt has the curiosity, even the inquisitiveness, of a Paul Theroux, so that he not only verbally paints nearly everyone's favourite city like a Canaletto, but also the astonishing people who made Venice what it is, and its present-day characters, with marvellous skill. Be sure to buy the book before you go there. Also, Judge Sewall's Apology by Richard Francis (Fourth Estate) and Postwar by Tony Judt (Heinemann); Judt's 878 pages turn easily across our Europe of 1945-2005, leaving one feeling wiser, breathless and privileged.
Frank O'Mahony
Bantry, Co Cork
I enjoyed Saturday by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape) and The New Hennessy Book of Irish Fiction edited by Dermot Bolger and Ciaran Carty (New Island), a collection of 21 short stories selected from the New Irish Writing page of the Sunday Tribune between 1996-2004. I particularly like Paul Perry's sensitive story The Judge, about the disintegration of a family forced into exile. As in Saturday, the personal and the political are intertwined here too.
Nollaig Rowan
Ranelagh, Dublin
The Rivercourt Bookclub was utterly seduced by Saturday by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape), with its controlled, circular plot, framed in technically brilliant writing that is deceptively easy to read and at times takes the breath away. Set against the backdrop of the London march against the war in Iraq, it takes the reader through one day in the thoughts and actions of Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon with a comfortable lifestyle but whose conscience is constantly self-examined. The moral dilemmas throughout Henry's day are those thrown up by our shared human experiences in the modern age. The twin sources of our ethical answers to these problems go back, as Bellow's Ravelstein might say, to Athens and Jerusalem, that is to say, to man's reason versus divine revelation. McEwan's novel suggests that a renewed, compassionate Athens may be upon us. An ideal fix for the holiday season. We also loved The Sea by John Banville (Picador) - at all times the originality in the writing washes over the reader, wave upon wave.
The Rivercourt Bookclub
Kilkenny
In the halcyon summer days of the 1940s and 1950s, before the preferred destination of Irish holidaymakers became the Cape and the Canaries, many of Dublin's denizens rented houses in Rush. They came to savour something of its bucolic bliss. Anyone with a nostalgic yearning for those times should read Niall Weldon's memoirs Sand In My Shoes - Memories of a Man from Rush (Ashfield Press). The author vividly captures vignettes of life there from his childhood in the 1920s. His story is a masterpiece of insight into the mores, customs and characters of a locality which are now rapidly vanishing. Horse, horticulture and the all-pervading influence of the landed gentry form a flavour of place and background. An historic perspective also shapes the narrative, with vivid accounts of local 18th-Century smugglers, tragic drownings and the cholera epidemic after the Famine. The author was a senior manager with Aer Lingus for more than 40 years, and his book presents an insider's perspective on the development of Irish aviation, and is a must for anyone with an interest in this area also.
Larry McGuinness
Rathfarnham, Dublin
Ursula Kane Caffrey's Suitcase Number Seven (the author in association with Personal History Publishing) captivated my attention, being a wonderfully researched and stunning account of the life of Tom Cleary, a prominent rugby player of the 1950s/1960s. Cafferty manages to get inside the personality of the man, who, though skilled in many sports, concentrated on the game of rugby. Although he played alongside such greats as Tony O'Reilly, Bill Mulcahy and many other household names of the era, and played for Ireland in South Africa, he failed to attain that elusive official cap he cherished so much. Cleary's fortunes began to decline after the Irish Rugby Football Union Tour of South Africa in 1961. This was the tour that launched O'Reilly on the world scene but was a time of home truths for Cleary; a greater contrast in fortunes of two colleagues can not be imagined. This book, well illustrated, poignantly reveals the man's strengths and weaknesses in a beautiful, sensitively written story.
William Galvin
Carrick-on-Suir, Co Tipperary
I enjoyed It's a Long, Long Way by Sebastian Barry (Faber) an enthralling account of the horrors of the first World War and the dilemma faced by many Irishman fighting for "little Belgium" while the 1916 Rising for the freedom of little Ireland was suppressed with rigid ferocity. I read extracts from the book to my English students who found it interesting to compare the scenes at the Front to the war poems they have studied by Wilfrid Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. I Also enjoyed Ian McEwan's Saturday - perhaps not as gripping as Atonement but an excellent read nevertheless, and a book that captures in typically McEwan style the beauty and the downside of life in modern, western society.
Michael McGowan
Sligo
In his collection of short stories A Day for the Fire (Destiny Publishing) Maurice O'Callaghan writes about rural life in west Cork. This is no ordinary collection of rural prose fiction, however. It
tackles issues that are not exclusive to rural Ireland, and features an uncomfortable conversation between two men in a bar about suicide. It also focuses on violent episodes from the Battle of Kinsale to Kilmichael. O'Callaghan has been in the movie business and as a result his style is very descriptive and cinematic. He juxtaposes the present and the past seamlessly. His writing is sparse and poetic and allows the reader plenty of room for interpretation; it has a contemporary and original feel to it.
Michael McMonagle
Derry Journal