Here are 100 books that The First Verse fans have personally recommended if you like
The First Verse.
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I’m a novelist, essayist, and journalist who’s written extensively about the problems and consolations of faith, about belonging in and out of faith, and about the tribes of what I think of as the In Between. When you’re in between, you’re neither in it nor out of it, whatever “it” might be for you. You bear an “infinity of traces,” as the writer Antonio Gramsci called these formative influences. My first novel looks at these influences directly, while my second one looks at them indirectly. I’m late in the game with a third novel now—a detective story that investigates a murder along with these same themes.
Indispensable. And the scandal of this autobiographical novel hasn’t worn off in a hundred-plus years. Stephen Dedalus is our young man, the self-appointed artist-priest. We see turn-of-the-century Ireland through his eyes and Irish Catholicism, too, each with its special richness and oppressiveness. Ultimately, it’s Stephen’s desire to escape "these nets" that drives his story. He’ll find God in his own way or, failing that, replace him with Art.
A masterpiece of modern fiction, James Joyce's semiautobiographical first novel follows Stephen Dedalus, a sensitive and creative youth who rebels against his family, his education, and his country by committing himself to the artist's life.
"I will not serve," vows Dedalus, "that in which I no longer believe...and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can." Likening himself to God, Dedalus notes that the artist "remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails." Joyce's rendering of the impressions of…
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.
McGahern is famous for writing slow-burning accounts of life in mid-century rural Ireland.
The Pornographer, however, is about a lonely bachelor who writes porn in his suburban bedsit then gets the bus into town to seduce women in gloomy dancehalls. He makes one of them pregnant and a battle of wills begins: he thinks she should obtain an abortion, she thinks they marry. This is remarkable because it is set in 1960s Dublin, a time and place in which the Catholic Church reigned supreme.
The book’s depiction of a night-time city composed of grimy pubs and starchy hospital wards is unforgettable, but its fascination for me lies in the protagonist’s casual cruelty towards his lover: this was what I had in mind when developing Cormac, the protagonist of my book – a passive, affable, but ultimately detached man who wreaks emotional havoc by accident and reflects a very Irish, still…
One of the preeminent writers of our time, John McGahern has captivated readers with such poignant and heart-wrenching novels as Amongst Women and The Dark.
In The Pornographer, Michael creates an ideal world of sex as a writer of pornographic fiction, while he bungles every phase of his entanglement with an older woman who has the misfortune to fall in love with him. But his insensitivity to this love is in direct contrast to the tenderness with which he attempts to make his aunt's slow death in a hospital tolerable. Everywhere in this rich novel is the drama of opposites,…
From an early age, I was steeped in stories. My mother is a great storyteller and would tell vivid and exciting stories of her childhood, giving me a great sense of my own life as a part of the story of generations. We moved around a lot for my father’s job, which was sometimes disorientating and could lead to loneliness, and I took refuge in libraries and in writing stories of my own. By the time I left school, literature was my big love and mainstay, and I took a degree in English and later taught it in schools. Reading and writing stories has since become my life.
I was engrossed by this beautifully written book about the way that things that happened in a previous generation can affect one’s happiness without one even knowing about them.
I totally identified with protagonist Veronica as she looks for clues as to why her brother committed suicide by imagining scenes from her parents’ past.
When I registered the subtle moment that was crucial to it all, everything fell into stark and terrible place, and it took my breath away. Both witty and sad, the book left a deep impression on me.
'Witty, original, inventive...utterly compelling' Daily Mail
Winner of the Man Booker Prize
The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan gather in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother Liam. It wasn't the drink that killed him - although that certainly helped - it was what happened to him as a boy in his grandmother's house, in the winter of 1968.
The Gathering is a novel about love and disappointment, about thwarted lust and limitless desire, and how our fate is written in the body, not in the stars.
'It is clearly the product of a remarkable intelligence, combined…
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.
A non-fiction recommendation this time, and a recent release.
Hennigan’s essay collection is a beautifully written account of the final years, and opaque recollections, of her grandmother Phil, who spent much of her life in various psychiatric institutions.
I have been interested in this theme for years – Ireland, in the first decades after independence from Britain, has some of the highest rates of citizen incarceration in the world: prisons, borstals, orphanages, magdalen laundries, and psychiatric hospitals both provided employment and regulation and also kept a whole population of ‘problem’ people out of sight).
This fact, and its repercussions in culture today, fascinate me, and Hennigan’s gentle and loving consideration of Phil’s trauma, loneliness, mania, and the maternal lineage it involves (her own mother was institutionalized) is also an angry illustration of just how badly women and the working class have been treated here.
"Phil doesn't like physical affection. She doesn't love you because you don't exist. She doesn't care if you have something important coming up. A busy week, a daunting appointment, a divorce, because she believes the world is going to end in the morning. Every morning."
Having grown up visiting her grandmother in various psychiatric hospitals, Molly Hennigan began writing about the gaps in and intimacies of her relationship with this matriarch. Tracing the organic path of her grandmother's experience to her great-grandmother's time in Irish mental hospitals, she explores her own family trauma and what it means to be an…
When I start a new book, my aim is to write something completely different from what I’ve written before. It’s challenging, but also important to keep things fresh. To me, a blank slate before each story is thrilling. To start with nothing, and end with something wholly original. This Never Happened, my third book, began with a feeling we’ve all had before: the feeling of not belonging. I asked myself, “What if I really didn't belong here, but was meant for somewhere else entirely?” From there, I created a character who grows increasingly unsure of his own identity and reality, themes that are also present in my selection of books below.
Mistakenis the tale of two boys (Kevin and Gerald) who are remarkably similar in appearance, though far from similar in affluence and background. The story is set in Dublin and told from the point of view of Kevin, now older and having just attended Gerald’s funeral. It slipstreams through past and present, and at nearly every corner it leaves Kevin questioning his own identity and memories, and wondering if perhaps the boys’ connection had even greater implications than he thought. In my book, there is a fictional novel within the novel, about twins who aren’t twins, and it is loosely inspired by the meeting of Kevin and Gerald in Mistaken.
Neil Jordan is an underrated talent, and his writing is superbly atmospheric here.
Menace both real and imagined haunt two Dubliners in this “unsettling . . . seductive” modern Gothic “that ultimately leaves one gasping” (Irish Times).
“Vampires, secrets, the mysteries of identity: the obsessions that run through the director Neil Jordan’s films are at the center of his beautifully enigmatic novel . . . of two look-alike men who feed off each other’s souls all their crisscrossed lives” (The New York Times).
Kevin Thunder and Gerald Spain have grown up on opposite sides of the Dublin economic divide. Kevin’s father is a bookie and his mother takes in lodgers on the city’s…
Out of all the flattering reviews of my books, my favourite is of a reader choking on her lunch. My book was about death. The reader, who survived, said it made her laugh so hard. I write about tough times by bringing out the it’s okay to smile now bits. The Midnight Years is about teen mental health, Happily Never After is about loneliness, and Flyaway Boy is about stereotyping. Making people laugh through tears is a tough task. Here are some books that cracked it.
Having a parent walk out on the family is the stuff that nightmares are made of. Yet, Roddy Doyle pulls it off in this masterpiece that has been my gold standard in writing humour for the twenty years since I read it.
Nine-year-old Paddy Clarke is trying hard to brag and battle his way through a regular childhood, even as he goes back to a home that threatens to break apart. The parents he loves are at war with each other, and he dreads the day his Da will leave and he will be called in to be "the man of the house." Inevitably, this day comes along.
Paddy Clarke is ten years old. Paddy Clarke lights fires. Paddy Clarke's name is written in wet cement all over Barrytown. Paddy Clarke's heroes are Father Damien (and the lepers), Geronimo and George Best. Paddy Clarke knows the exact moment to knock a dead scab from his knee. Paddy Clarke hates his brother Francis because that's the rule. Paddy Clarke loves his Ma and Da, but it seems like they don't love each other, and Paddy wants to understand, but can't.
At a time when our news feeds are dominated by war and disease and brain-dead politicians I find my escape in the genre known as ‘uplit’ or ‘uplifing literature.’ These are feel-good stories that have a simple goal, to introduce us to characters like ourselves – human, fallible, unreasonable, and flawed – and take us on a journey with them through thick and thin. Not every story ends in the happiest of endings but the reader is always left with a sigh of satisfaction and a feeling of hope. And couldn’t we all do with a bit more of that?
Here I am recommending three books in one, because I think they should be read one after the other in a single holiday week where the rain is pouring down outside and you can lock yourself away and completely disappear into Doyle’s working-class Dublin universe. If you do not fall in love with the Rabbite family in all their imperfections, then uplit is not for you. I guarantee that no bad vibes will penetrate your mind while you are reading the Barrytown trilogy.
A one-volume edition of the celebrated trio of novels about the Rabbitte family, from the Booker Prize-winning author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
Look for Roddy Doyle’s new novel, Smile, coming in October of 2017
The Barrytown Trilogy gathers Roddy’s Doyle’s first three novels into one volume: The Commitments, one of the funniest rock’n’roll novels ever written, about a group of aspiring musicians on a mission to bring soul to Dublin; The Snapper, about the progression of twenty-year-old Sharon Rabbitte’s pregnancy on her family; and The Van, a finalist for the Booker Prize, a tender and hilarious tale of…
When I was a kid, I looked forward to Fridays. Not just because it was the end of a school week, but because that’s when the TV Guide arrived with the morning newspaper. While I ate my cereal, I’d circle the movies I wanted to watch the following week. If they were late-late movies, I’d set my alarm and get up and watch them alone in the living room (with the sound turned way down). I was also an avid reader, and it wasn’t long before I started pairing my reading and my viewing. I still do that, with a special interest in short stories and their film adaptations.
The story is a classic, of course, but what I find poignant is that famed director John Huston, adventurer and rabblerouser, chose this quiet story to adapt as his final film (The Dead), and did so, while dying, with the help of his son (screenplay) and daughter (leading role). It’s an extraordinarily faithful adaptation, even, and especially, in its slowness. (Each time I read the story, I wonder—even though I know the answer—Where is this going?)
Joyce Carol Oates, less faithfully, reimagined the story in Marriages and Infidelities, keeping the title, but replacing Irish melancholy with American anxiety, while hewing—with Easter eggs along the way for careful readers—to its theme of intimacy and its limitations. All three versions are exquisitely sad and beautiful.
A shocking confession from his wife prompts Gabriel to reconsider what he knows and understands of his wife and their shared past, whether it is better to die young, and what will be remembered of him when he is gone.
Critically acclaimed author James Joyce’s Dubliners is a collection of short stories depicting middle class life in Dublin in the early twentieth century. First published in 1914, the stories draw on themes relevant to the time such as nationalism and Ireland’s national identity, and cement Joyce’s reputation for brutally honest and revealing depictions of everyday Irish life. At the heart…
Over the course of my so-called career as a travel writer, the ‘I’ve-Got-A Big-One’ school favoured by the male of the species has ceded ground. Women, less interested in ‘conquering,’ have pioneered a kind of creative non-fiction that suits the travel genre. I prefer it to the blokeish business of seeing how dead you can get. It notices more. As the decades unfurled – Pole to Pole, via Poland – I realised, more and more, the debt I owe to the other women who not only set sail but also unsparingly observed the world that turns within each self.
I picked this because it showed me – and still does – that the most foreign journey is within, and that when the body stops travelling, the spirit takes over the trek.
Brennan is a fabulous writer – at her best, among the best – and in her head (she wore a beehive that according to a colleague at The New Yorkerwas taller than she was) she is travelling all the time.
I’m a fantasy author and mythologist who studies myth’s place in culture, history, and heritage conservation. To finish my doctorate, I moved from Seattle to Galway, Ireland and never left. Myth and folklore permeate the landscape around me as well as my day-to-day life. After grad school I returned to my first love, fiction, with all the knowledge and passion that came from the better part of a decade spent studying mythology. When I’m not writing, I spend my time exploring 5000-year-old tombs or practicing Fiore (14th century Italian sword fighting) with my husband. The Serpent and the Swan is the debut fairy tale in a much larger series.
This book is one of the best at capturing the impact of myth on history, culture, and politics. Thompson starts long before the Easter 1916 Rising, the book’s central event, and examines how Celticity became a focal point of reclaiming an Irish identity separate from the British. Just as Jack Zipes’ Grimm Legacies demonstrates how the collection of folklore developed a unified German cultural identity, Thompson illustrates how collecting (and in many cases updating) the myths of the land gave Ireland not only a new identity but also a new history. The heroes of those mythic stories would be used for the next three centuries as allegories for both Ireland and the Irish in art, literature, theatre, and political rhetoric. It is the blueprint of all my worldbuilding.
We know from our literary histories that there was a movement called the Irish Literary Renaissance, and that Yeats was at its head. We know from our political histories that there is now a Republic of Ireland because of a nationalistic movement that, militarily, began with the insurrection of Easter Week, 1916. But what do these two movements have to do with one another?… Because I came to history with literary eyes, I could not help seeing history in terms and shapes of imaginative experience. Thus Movement, Myth, and Image came to be the way in which the nature of…
