Thanks to all readers who sent us details of their top books of the year, shining a light on mainstream titles but also on lesser-known gems. Here's an edited selection of some of your choices - and why you made them.
I have long been a fan of Kate O'Brien's work and Eibhear Walshe's very readable and impressive Kate O'Brien: A Writing Life (Irish Academic Press) opened my eyes to her fascinating and controversial life. Her literary imagination was shaped by her background and upbringing as part of Limerick's emerging merchant class in the early 20th century. One of seven children, her comfortable childhood was disrupted by the early death of her mother, and when Kate was only five she was sent as a boarder to Laurel Hill convent school, where the nuns became vitally important to her spiritual and moral formation. All her later novels were pervaded with a Catholic consciousness, but in spite of this she fell foul of the Irish censor, when The Land of Spices, published in February 1941, was banned by the Censorship Board three months later. Walshe makes the point that O'Brien was quite a radical and subversive writer, something which will now encourage me to re-read her novels to discover what I may have missed on my first reading!
Phil Young, Foxrock, Co Dublin
It was a bumper year for 1916 junkies. Charles Townshend's Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion (Penguin) was the best in the field by a long shot. The narrative, beautifully written and not without humour, takes the reader through the events of Easter week 1916. Another book of this genre I enjoyed was Desmond's Rising: Memoirs 1913 to Easter 1916 (Liberties Press ), by Desmond Fitzgerald, father of Garret, who penned the foreword. My favourite of all, though, was All in The Blood (A&A Farmar), by Geraldine Plunkett Dillon. Edited by her granddaughter, Honor
Ó Brolchain, its central character, Countess Plunkett, Ma, is the formidable matriarch of a wealthy nationalist family who is truly the mother from hell. Surely this is a role tailor-made for Meryl Streep, an actor who can do Irish (Dancing at Lughnasa), upper-crust (Out of Africa), period (The French Lieutenant's Woman, Out of Africa, Sophie's Choice, etc) and domineering and unkind (The Devil Wears Prada), in her sleep.
Patrick O'Byrne, Phibsborough, Dublin
As someone who has mucked about with paint since infancy, I was enthralled by Peter Carey's tale of art and skulduggery Theft: A Love Story (Faber). Carey's sentences have the gusto of brushwork, the mysterious allure of worked pigment. Months go by, yet countless images remain in the mind as resistant to fade as anything devised by colour merchant. The artist's damaged, 220-pound brother, Hugh, was undoubtedly Character of the Year. Novel of the year however, and also painterly, albeit using a starker palette, was Cormac McCarthy's The Road (Picador). After the relative disappointment of No Country For Old Men, here is a book that stands alongside his finest. Seldom has a landscape stripped of all beauty been so beautifully rendered. The journey is long and harrowing but hardly ever does a page fall to the left without McCarthy compelling the reader to stop in his or her tracks and marvel awhile before carrying on.
Cornelius Browne, Tubberkeen, Dungloe, Co Donegal
The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates, by Des Ekin (O'Brien Press), about the kidnap in 1631 of the inhabitants of this west Cork town by pirates, has everything you could ask for in a book: colourful characters, a gripping plot, and, above all, a true story - you couldn't make this up. Also worth a look is Watching the Door (Lilliput Press), Kevin Myers's memoir of his baptism into journalism in 1970s Belfast. As readable as it is insightful, it reminds you that for all his bluster and histrionics, sometimes Mr Myers has something worthwhile to say.
Mark Tyrell
The Irish Times Book of the 1916 Rising (Gill & Macmillan), by Shane Hegarty and Fintan O'Toole, is a fascinating account of the days just before and after the Easter Rising in 1916, with amazing photographs of armed British soldiers on the streets of Dublin and eyewitness accounts of events as well as Irish Times editorials from the relevant dates. Absorbing and visually engaging, and educational too. Break No Bones, by Kathy Reichs (Heinemann), featuring Temperance Brennan, a forensic anthropologist, is an enthralling thriller with a sympathetic and believable heroine. I was delighted to find an Irish heroine on a par with Temperance Brennan in Patrick Dunne's The Lazarus Bell (Tivoli) - the second book featuring Illaun Bowe, an archaeologist. In this fast-paced thriller she deals with racism, female genital mutilation, religious iconography and medieval history, amongst other things.
June Fitzgibbon, Cork city
Poetic sensibilities, sometimes in prose, informed my reading this year. Chronologically: Seamus Heaney - District and Circle (Faber) "If self is a location, so is love:/ Here and there and now and then, a stance"; Tom Leonard - Being a Human Being and Other Poems (Object Permanence) "a sentence at last/ a sentence with a silence in it/
- and at the end of it"; Michael Longley - Collected Poems (Cape) "Old poets regurgitate/ Pellets of chewed up paper/ Packed with shrew tails, frog bones/ Beetle wings, wisdom"; Colum McCann - Zoli (Weidenfeld). Based on gypsy poet Papsuza, Zoli is a mesmerising creation, a poet gone silent who "When a bird breaks the line of the window it surprises (her) almost as much as a word". Finally, John Jordan: Crystal Clear, edited by Hugh McFadden (Lilliput), is a collection of essays and other prose pieces that exemplify academic knowledge communicated with critical clarity and humane compassion.
Hayden Murphy, Edinburgh
Kate Holmquist's enjoyable first novel, The Glass Room (Penguin Ireland), begins on mother-of-two Louisa Maguire's 37th birthday, when she tells her husband she wants a divorce, and really becomes interesting when Louisa recalls the summer she was 17. That year she lived with an eccentric aunt, an artist, in her beachside home in the Hamptons, in the States, and fell in love there for the first time. A good story, this. I look forward to her second novel. I also admired Terrorist, by John Updike (Hamish Hamilton), in which he has explored the mentality that creates terrorism - from within the USA.
Sheelagh Coyle, Mountmellick, Co Laois
The Irish-language novel, Hurlamaboc, by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne (Cois Life Teo), is teenage-speak as Gaeilge. It centres on three teenagers in their Leaving Certificate year - their lives, loves and mothers. The novel is sprinkled with English: "Agus go tobann is stay at home housewives iad, seachas career girls." It is wry and modern and boosts your confidence in understanding our language whether you are heading for the Leaving Certificate or, like me, have left it some 30 years ago. Unlike other collections of short stories, William Wall's No Paradiso (Brandon) does not include a story of that name. Instead it includes stories with the intriguing titles In Xanadu, What Slim Boy, O Pyrrha and The William Walls. They are varied in their location, style and subject but all are written with such sensitivity that it is not surprising to discover that this William Wall, from Cork, is a poet also.
Nollaig Rowan, Ranelagh, Dublin
This year has been a particularly good one for the publication of literary works by Irish writers, North and South; indeed Northern writers, in particular, feature significantly. Even if one leaves aside the obvious choice of a new collection of verse by Seamus Heaney, District & Circle (Faber), 2006 was noteworthy for the launching of Michael Longley's Collected Poems, a truly magisterial book of a lifetime's considerable achievement in the writing of verse. Another noteworthy poetry collection came from the veteran Northern writer Robert Greacen, whose Selected & New Poems was edited by Jack W Weaver (Salmon). In prose fiction, two volumes stand out: Bernard MacLaverty's short story collection, Matters of Life & Death (Cape); and the late John McGahern's Creatures of the Earth: New and Selected Stories (Faber).
Hugh McFadden, Harold's Cross, Dublin
The Lazarus Bell, by Patrick Dunne (Tivoli), is the second outing for the crime cracking female archaeologist Illaun Bowe. The story blends Meath's medieval past with contemporary news headlines, such as a headless corpse floating in a stream, violent attacks on immigrants and an unknown killer disease. It develops into a page-turner of a thriller as the heroine juggles a complicated personal life and her efforts to find out why an ancient miracle-working statue of the Virgin Mary may have been buried in a plague graveyard. Also worth reading are Echo Park, by Michael Connelly (Orion), and I Was Vermeer, by Frank Wynne (Bloomsbury). Han Van Meegeren was a real life art forger who even fooled the Nazis and this is a compelling true story about how the art world can be easily fooled into accepting fake for the real thing. The book is memorable for me if only for the quote ". . . art is not art until it's sold. Until then it is merely a storage problem".
William Dalton, Blanchardstown, Dublin
After stumbling on Ami McKay's novel The Birth House (Fourth Estate) by accident, I became enchanted with it. The story encompasses the lore of midwifery of old in Nova Scotia with the suspicion of "new modern medicine". Ami McKay's use of language and imagery creates a sense of warmth and intrigue throughout the novel. The women of Scots Bay, Nova Scotia, are constantly changing roles as care-givers, mothers, wives, and friends. The reader is taken back to a time where life was less complicated and tradition had a powerful influence. Childbirth was viewed as a natural process and not a medical procedure. The midwife played a powerful role within society, providing not only medical treatment but compassion as well.
Andrea Baltrus, Galway city
Suite Française, by Irène Némirovsky (Chatto), is a marvellous depiction of chaos and muddle and what happens to ordinary people overtaken by extraordinary events, made all the more poignant by Némirovsky's tragic death before she could finish her projected Suite. Purity of Blood, by Arturo Pérez-Reverte (Weidenfeld), is a rollicking read. The Captain Alatriste series conveys the grandeur and decadence of 17th-century Spain with far more vividness than my university lectures on the topic. Moscow 1941, by Rodric Braithwaite (Profile), is beautifully written, with the life of the ordinary Russian of the time sympathetically portrayed. I marvelled at Braithwaite's breath of knowledge and felt again how much we owe the Russians for their dogged endurance in the war against Hitler.
Anne O'Neill, Co Cork
A recent review of a biography of John Betjeman made me realise I had no idea what kind of poetry he wrote, so I bought the newly republished The Best Loved Poems of John Betjeman (John Murray). What a treasure trove of sparkling wit. I would recommend it to anyone who never reads a poem, for the sheer hilarity and brevity of much of its content. The Widow of the South, by Robert Hicks (Warner Books, New York), is based on a true story of the American Civil War. A romance set in a field hospital, it makes gruesome reading at times but gives a real sense of the horror of war and how ordinary lives are made extraordinary. And finally, The View from Castle Rock, by Alice Munro (Chatto).
Mary MacDiarmada, Castleknock, Co Dublin
For the last 30 years, Richard Dawkins has been following (and in the case of his The Selfish Gene, leading) the way in which science challenges our assumptions on the status of our own species within the greater scheme. Though in his previous eight intriguingly titled publications there has never been a doubt about his stance on the role of a Creator, the unceremoniously named current The God Delusion (Transworld ) does exactly what it says on the tin. Why do so many people still look to religion for guidance? Does not science provide a unified authority on the workings of the universe where religion continues to promote division and conflict? Dawkins does enough analysis of material, from the "proofs" of Aquinas to Zeno's paradox and lots (including Lot and his despicable morals) in between, to give a long and engrossingly thoughtful read. Nobody has a good excuse not to read this book, but those with the flimsiest get-out will run a thousand cubits from it.
Brendan Dunne, Clongriffin, Dublin
Nothing I read this year came close to The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, by Bill Bryson (Doubleday). When much of the current affairs we read is tragic and depressing, it's a treat to have an author who can deliver a good laugh on almost every page - not for the first time in the case of Bill Bryson. Clearly, a vast amount of research goes into his books. Though he is chiefly a travel writer, this is a memoir of his childhood in the US. For those of us of a certain age it's a nostalgic read as it chronicles life in the 1950s, and though it's set in Des Moines it's amazing how much of it is everyone's story.
Ann Lane, Donnybrook, Dublin
If, like me, your college years were filled with yearning to be free-thinking and free-living like Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre, Tête-à-Tête: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, by Hazel Rowley (Chatto), will throw open the blinds on their often anguished lives and tempestuous relationships. If you thought philosophy, and a life spent considering what it all means, leads to happiness, this book will put you right!
Patricia Costello, South Dublin
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, by John Boyne (David Fickling), deserves its worldwide acclaim and to be the book of 2006, while three of the six Booker-shortlisted books stood out for me: Carry Me Down by MJ Hyland (Canongate); The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai (Hamish Hamilton), which won; and The Night Watch, by Sarah Waters (Virago). Also great were The Emperor's Children, by Claire Messud (Picador), One Good Turn, by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday), and The Saffron Kitchen, by Yasmin Crowther (Time Warner). Finally, Where the Hazel Falls: An Anthology of Modern Irish Verse (Electric Publications) is my poetry choice for the year.
Dr Evelyn Moorkens, Rathfarnham, Co Dublin
Diana Evans's book, 26a (Vintage), is an enchanting story about the relationship between twins, with delightful snippets of family life. Evans writes beautifully about an emotionally devastating subject: the suicide of a twin. This is, however, a very humorous book which leaves the reader with a wonderful sense of family love and loyalty. If you ever wondered what happened to Paula after The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, read Paula Spencer, by Roddy Doyle (Jonathan Cape). Doyle's insight into the life of an alcoholic woman is amazing. For One More Day, by Mitch Albom (Sphere), is the story of Charlie, who gets the chance to spend one more day with his late mother. It is an emotional story where Charlie realises what a wonderful woman his mother was. My favourite book this year - I read it in one sitting.
Mary Haren, Elmbank, Co Cavan
My choice of titles for 2006 was a search for a sense of place and I was not disappointed. Susan Duncan's autobiography, Salvation Creek (Random House), revealed a small community united in their beautiful geographical location on the waterfront. Duncan tells her story of cancer, loss and love with a gritty sense of humour and self-knowledge. In The Wedding Officer (Time Warner), Anthony Capella evokes a war torn Naples, which is delicious, sensuous and sexy, with Vesuvius simmering in the background. Peter Prince's Adam Hanaway (Bloomsbury), is a bawdy romp through 18th-century Lisbon, showing a city divided by wealth, position and religion. In Ancestor Stones (Bloomsbury), Aminatta Forna's Africa leaps from the page. It is narrated by four generations of women whose disturbing images illuminate a country in formation, transition and modernisation. Back in Dublin, Christine Dwyer Hickey's The Gambler (New Island) captures the disturbing decline of a family with an unerring sense of time and place.
Carmel Richards, Dundrum, Dublin
Linda Grant's The People on the Street (Virago) is an excruciatingly honest account of what it means to be an Israeli in the 21st century. In the Bauhaus city of Tel Aviv (where café society still exists), Grant listened to many difficult stories, but the chapter covering her visit to an army base at Nablus is horribly disturbing. Here, she met "destructed" people on both sides of the conflict. Her description of 18-year-old soldiers, endowed with mobile phones for the benefit of their "hysterical army of mothers", is extraordinary; one soldier told Grant that the only thing the Israeli army gives a boy is "a trauma for life". Gore Vidal's Point to Point Navigation (Little, Brown) is his second, and last, book of memoirs. He is moving, graciously he hopes, towards the door marked Exit. The story is told mainly through humorous anecdote, but the gossipy style takes nothing away from the brilliance of the writing. Vidal, the New Deal Liberal, grieves for what America has become. Still, he says, "somehow the centre appears to hold".
Madeleine Humphreys, Baggotonia, Dublin
My very good friend the librarian looked askance at me as she checked out my books and remarked, "D'you know that Women of A Certain Age read biographies?" So I've reached the Age of Biographies and am hooked on them. That's why I took Thomas Hardy to bed with me - and I wasn't disappointed. The Time Torn Man, by Claire Tomalin (Viking), took me down the byways of Hardy's writing life - through the angst of his personal life, his ideas of romance and his attempts at social climbing. Tomalin's research is meticulous. She made me feel sympathy for the man. Through her I began to understand his stories a lot better and wanted to read Tess of the d'Urbervilles again.
Mae Leonard, Woodlands, Naas, Co Kildare
Philip Ó Ceallaigh's Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse (Penguin Ireland) is a collection of dark tales that bravely explores the seedier side of life. Based mainly in Eastern Europe, Ó Ceallaigh's lonely and often callous characters are portrayed in an engaging and believable way by the clear, pure, succinct prose. Literature-loving male prostitutes, heart-removing stage performers and brothel-using would-be novelists make up a memorable cast. I would also recommend Lionel Shriver's Double Fault (Serpent's Tail), which poses the infinitely unanswerable question of whether gender equality is ever really possible.
Marie Gallagher, Newbridge, Co Kildare