The most recommended books about Belfast

The unique underground setting hooked me from the start.

Ember is the last beacon of light in a darkened world, and now even its great lamps are at risk of going out. Friends Lina and Doon must find a way to keep them burning or face utter darkness and the end of civilization as they know it.

I loved the post-apocalyptic feel to this story, as well as all the mysteries and secrets lurking behind every dimly lit corner. 

Ireland again, this time in the 80s, and right in the middle of the Troubles. Adrian McKinty’s cop, Sean Duffy, is an outsider, a Catholic in a Protestant police force. He’s irreverent, sarcastic, bitter, and a more than occasional drug user. In Police at the Station (6th in the series) Duffy investigates the murder of a small-time heroin dealer, who’s been shot by a crossbow. Meanwhile his posh girlfriend wants to move…the Sean Duffy novels are tough, funny, exciting, and extremely well done. Enjoy!

An epic love story. This novel explores a Catholic and a Protestant trying to be together when it was once inequivocally frowned upon. A huge hurdle that tries to prevent love from flourishing. And what’s a story without some kind of love angle in there somewhere? No one can know what they do, so starting a relationship with someone out with the organisation isn’t an option. Unless they’re lucky enough to find love with one of the other members, their fate was sealed when they signed their life away.

The Belfast locale is utterly charming, and I loved these characters and how their lives intersected. There’s so much we share with the neighbors and people in our community, sometimes unbeknownst to us, and Old’s storytelling reminds us of these delicate threads. Her writing is a joy to read, and if you haven’t read her before, start here and keep reading.

I found this novel on a secondhand stall in Kenya when I was 18 or 19 and devoured it. Little known today, it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and later adapted by the BBC.

Judd relates a tour by a fictional British Army unit in Northern Ireland in some of the most violent days of the Troubles in the 1970s. The protagonist, Charles Thoroughgood, is an Oxford graduate at a time when most army officers were school leavers, and the book chants his increasing disillusionment.

My early edition featured on the cover – next to a crouching individual in combats toting a pistol on a lanyard – an endorsement from Jack Higgins: “Quite simply one of the best novels of army life I’ve read in years.” Higgins was right. 

I chose this book of short stories because I loved Caldwell's winning entry for the 2021 British National Story Award: "All the People Were Mean and Bad" included in this book. 

This story focuses on an encounter between the mother and an attentive man in the next seat who fetches milk for the hungry child. We learn she's an architect, lonely and yearning to return to her profession, dreading becoming pregnant again, as her husband is often away.

As I read this book on a flight to Crete, I observed a baby being nursed by an extended family, each taking turns to amuse the little one. And I thought, if only all parents had such loving support to help them cope.

This is a unique novel, both in ideas and in concept.

It’s actually two novels in one, the first taking place in 1880s England, the second in1930s California. The two novels are apposite, meaning after you finish the first you’re obliged to flip the book over to read the second. This format is actually quite old. It’s called tête-bêche – a book split into two parts back-to-back, head-to-foot.

To be honest, I don’t know how this will work or if it will work in ebook form. But like all of my picks it should be read in hardcover. The two tales are steeped in the mores of their respective time periods. They read like a first-rate thriller, and of course both become revelatory at the end of the second novel when they intersect.

The author’s grasp of both time periods is absolute and his characters grip you from the first… show more.

Set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, Trespasses tells the story of Cushla, a young schoolteacher living with and caring for her alcoholic mother.

At night, she works at her family’s pub, where she meets Michael, a barrister known for defending IRA members. He is also Protestant (Cushla is Catholic), married, and devastatingly handsome.

Trespasses has it all: gorgeous writing, humor, pathos, romance, and a rising sense of dread as you try to figure out which tragic turn the story will take.

Absurd, funny, ingenious, sad, and violent, this book is an ode to Belfast. The first line – and I’m big into first lines – runs: “All stories are love stories.” Are they? Are they not? I still don’t know. Yet that’s the nature of the characters here, the nature of this cynical society too, back in 1994 as the ceasefire trembled into life and everyone was confused by the silence. So, ceasefire time, an obese Protestant waster cashes in by selling ‘ethnic accessories,’ including walking sticks for leprechauns. And his erudite, tough Catholic mate prowls Belfast while getting hassled and thinking deeply about getting laid. Self-appointed ‘revolutionaries’ get torn a new one here, and rightly so. All of Wilson’s books are blunt among the beautiful. Sadly there’s all too few of them.

I was so moved when I read The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne that it inspired me to write my novel with my protagonist Laurence J Benbo as a male equivalent of Judith Hearne, an innocent exploited by an uncaring world. The quotidian details of Judith’s life are delineated brilliantly by Moore in all her wretchedness reminiscent of some of the characters in Joyce’s Dubliners which Moore would have read and which possibly influenced him. The dark surroundings of Judith’s life lead her into a fantasy world aided by her one necessary weakness—alcohol. But, as Moore points out, it doesn’t have to end tragically. There is a glimmer of hope with life going on, but nothing as before.