100 books like Four Letters of Love

Anyone who’s ever taken drugs (or drunk an energy drink) will know that the high always comes at a price: you are not being given new energy; you are just borrowing tomorrow’s energy, and you will pay for it later. 

This book tells the story of a man who lives a life of hedonistic depravity but sails through it all, apparently untouched by experience, his face as young and innocent-looking as ever. But all his guilt and fear show up on the face of the portrait of himself that he keeps in his attic. I can’t think of a more perfect example of the novel-as-metaphor.

Girl Reading is a highly creative and imaginative book. Superbly written, it takes the reader on a journey through time, and the vehicle for that journey is art. There are seven scenes from seven different time periods, each depicting an artist and a portrait of a girl or woman reading. It is such an original concept and it’s thoroughly absorbing. Given my fascination with history and art, I absolutely devoured it. Girl Reading went on to play an important role in my own writing life. I was so impressed with it that when it came to sending my own book out to agents, I sent my manuscript to Katie Ward’s agent, who is now my own.   

Tracy Chevalier once again manages to transport readers into iconic works of art, bringing the story of famed images to life, and exploring the personality of every hand that took to create it. Set in 1490, this book invents a tale behind the creation of “The Lady and the Unicorn Tapestries.” It has everything an engrossing read should have—romance, ambition, betrayal. But for the medieval aficionado, Chevalier’s incredible research on the creation of a tapestry—from designing the cartoon, to sheering the sheep’s wool to the dying it, to the weaving and the warping—is described as a master class that leaves the reader wanting to pick up a loom. 

In 1936, Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich is spending every night in a hallway by the elevator, ready for the secret police he’s sure are coming for him. By the end of the novel, he’s publicly celebrated, but the requirements of government approval weigh as heavily on him as government threats. What, both Barnes and Shostakovich himself ask, might his music have been like under different circumstances? “The last questions of a man’s life do not come with any answers; that is their nature. They merely wail in the head, factory sirens in F sharp.” Barnes’s slim, swift novel offers no easy answers as it examines how moral compromise corrodes a life and deforms that life’s work.

Inspector Mallon covers the latter decades of the nineteenth century in Dublin history, which were characterised by unrest, extremist violence, and police strikes. The late 1800s were also the service years of the celebrated Dublin Police detective John Mallon, ‘the Great Irish Detective’. The book explores the behind-the-scenes relationships between official Dublin and the force, and between the police and the political activists. McCracken examines the impact the Dublin detectives, known as G-men due to their work in the G Division, had on undermining the political threats and bringing known Fenians and members of the Invincibles, responsible for the horrific Phoenix Park murders, to trial.

In Dublin Hanged, Henry paints an evocative picture of the turn-of-the-eighteenth-century Irish capital collapsing under rising property crime, food shortages due to series of particularly inclement winters, and political unrest. He also vividly captures the events that led to the organisation of the first metropolitan uniformed police in the British Isles, which came to be widely unpopular. Henry shows, the organisation of the force was costly and in order to fund the new police, the household tax ‘skyrocketed’ virtually overnight. Henry’s analysis reveals there was a marked decline in the frequency of rape and violent assaults in the years following the introduction of the police in October 1786, indicating a degree of effectiveness of the new police despite the lack of its popularity.

When most people think of noir, they think of a cynical fedora-wearing, trenchcoated detective wisecracking his way through a mystery, and while that is part of the genre, it isn’t the whole of it. Noir can be funny, but that humor needs to be dark, and cynicism is a definite component. All of that is included in this book and it’s delivered with an Irish twist. Bruton’s hitman, Patrick Callen, who rides a bike through the streets of Dublin, is a man who likes lists: To-Do List: Kill Henry O’Neil, Meet the Bronze Man, Buy Food, Sleep with Olivia, Bike Shop, Visit Ma. But when he finds a baby on the job, it interrupts both his list and his life. A hitman and a baby—if that doesn’t make you want to read the book, nothing will.

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… show more.

This book continues to astound me. Flann O’Brien puts together such a surreal set of circumstances for his unnamed narrator that the book is hard to put down.

O’Brien doesn’t strike me as the Hunter Thompson type; this book made me wonder what they were brewing into the whiskey on the Emerald Isle. The improbability of the narrator’s criminal activity and the law enforcement response often seems like a fever dream, albeit a very entertaining one. Even though I now know the M. Knight Shyamalan twist, I still can re-read this book, thinking, “What’s next? What’s next?”

In 1955, the only publisher who would touch The Ginger Man was the Olympia Press in Paris. Its bawdy prose and its highly original style made it an immediate classic. Donleavy took one of the experimental styles that Joyce used in Ulysses and turned it into this black humor novel following Sebastian Dangerfield, an American in Ireland, maneuvering his way through college, marriage, fatherhood, and friendships in a roguish, outlandish manner. Time magazine considered him “One of the most outrageous scoundrels in contemporary fiction.” Rarely have I finished reading a book and then picked it up to read again. Donleavy’s way of weaving words, his use of first and third person in the same paragraph, his telegraphic sentences, his ribald humor were so fresh and singular, as you follow Dangerfield from one mishap to the next, alarmed by his behavior, and yet rooting for him all the same. It was… show more.