Why am I passionate about this?
I’m an Irish writer drawn to the ways in which the biggest questions – of human nature, existence, late capitalist realism, politics, ethics, and consciousness – play out via the minutiae of specific locations; in this case, the city of Dublin, where I’ve spent most of my adult life. I don’t think of cities as monuments but living and complex microcosms of concerns and urgencies the whole world shares.
Niamh's book list on capturing the haunted geography of Dublin
Why did Niamh love this book?
A post-Donna Tart’s Secret History-esque tale of literary mystics who make up a secret society at Trinity College Dublin which tends, unfairly, to get left behind in analyses of Irish ‘Celtic Tiger’ fiction.
This is fiction from or dealing with the abrupt and accelerated modernity that hit Ireland like a cultural torpedo in the early 2000s, and quite a lot of it fails to capture the discombobulation of living through that time.
The First Verse is a campus novel about sexy secretive students and shady deeds which also plots a queer geography of Dublin’s gay scene as well as illustrating the emotional tension that exists in Dublin between city centre and its polarised northern and southern suburbs.
Dublin is such a mannered city, caught in Georgian poses while falling apart as postmodernity obliterates its value system, that it surprises me there aren’t more Dublin novels about baroque subcultures. McCrea is…
1 author picked The First Verse as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
A thrilling twist to the suspenseful games of The Rule of Four and The Da Vinci Code sends a gay student reeling through the pubs, nightclubs and streets of present-day Dublin. 'In this brilliant first novel, the best of recent memory, a young Irish writer of great psychological dexterity takes on a handful of exciting themes. For a hundred years, Ireland has provided the English-speaking world with its most eloquent writers; Barry McCrea now joins this illustrious company.' - Edmund White
- Coming soon!