The most recommended books about Dublin

Wonderful, fast-paced urban fantasy set in Dublin, Ireland. Gargoyles are former avenging angels who now watch over churches – that hook was simply irresistible to me. When some artifacts go missing from his cathedral, it’s up to the gargoyle Padraig and an elderly Knight of Malta (whose modern-day steed is a Rolls Royce) to find the sinister culprit and set things aright. The charming descriptions of Dublin, along with the witty banter of the heroes and the interesting nuggets of Celtic lore made me wish Kurtz had written a whole series of Gargoyle books. Sadly, she did not. Trigger assurance: the religious aspects are carefully handled so as to enhance the atmosphere of the story, not to insult or preach. St. Patrick’s Gargoyle is 200 of the fastest pages I have ever read.

I really enjoyed this book because it rang true for me.

The new partnership between Det. Scorcher Kennedy and Richie Curran is one that I’m quite familiar with. French balances the challenges of Scorcher’s personal life with the complexities of the investigation at hand very well.

In many ways, this book reminds me a lot of the BBC series Happy Valley (which absolutely nails the policing culture). And that it’s set in Ireland doesn’t hurt!

I first read this book in my teens and it profoundly affected me. The storyline is set in Dublin from 1907 to 1914, when a third of the city’s residents were destitute. Large families lived in single rooms in the dilapidated former homes of wealthy landlords. The author weaves the lives of his fictional characters into the workers’ revolt and great lockout of 1913, a tragic time for the ordinary people of Dublin. In spite of this, there are wonderful scenes of kindness and self-sacrifice that a close-knit community will often provide. I feel this book greatly influenced my own writing decades after first reading it. 

This is the most recent novel to make my list. As much as I relished Rooney’s earlier work, her latest is heftier, for it grapples with the genuine planetary and personal crises faced by her generation. Her characters don’t shy away from speaking openly about love, sex, and relationships—or the perverse economic system that is rapidly bringing humanity to its knees with consumer-driven smiles painted on its faces. Neither do her characters hold back from earnest discussions of Marxism. The latter note is getting wide play culturally, particularly with millennials, but mainstream media has rarely picked up on the reverberations underfoot. Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? is not so reticent—and more rewarding for its brazen honesty about the personal and the political.

I think Sebastian Barry is one of the greatest contemporary novelists whose prose unfailingly sings, pirouettes, and enriches. I would recommend all his novels, which take various members of the Dunne or McNulty families over time and place. This particular novel is set in the First World War and follows Willie Dunne as he leaves Dublin to fight for the British, only to find himself caught on the wrong side at the Easter uprising and having to face his own countrymen. It is a brilliant depiction of a young Irish tommy out of his depth in a brutal war, fighting on the side of a country for whom he has mixed loyalties, of the ambivalence and tension of the Irish war of independence, and those caught in its cross hairs.

It took me a while to get round to reading this novel, which was both set and written during Covid, but it was totally worth the wait.

As my novels are also set during a pandemic (fictional in my case) I’m always curious how other writers use viruses as inspiration, and Catherine Ryan Howard’s has used Covid to create a cracking thriller. Starting with the discovery of a body, the plot keeps twisting and turning so every time you think you have worked out what is happening, the rug is pulled out from under you.

Ciara and Oliver meet in the very early days of the pandemic, and when lockdown is announced they move in together. But neither of them are quite who they seem…Excellent novel, full of suspense.

This is also a book by an Irish writer, Sebastian Barry.  First of all the book is beautifully written. I cannot read a badly written book no matter how interesting the plot, and here from the very first page you know you are in the hands of a master. 

This book is told in the first person by Lily Bere, an impoverished Irish immigrant to the US looking back over about 70 years of her life. The story begins when Lily was forced to flee Ireland for her life at the end of the First World War and recounts the great sorrows and disappointments (with her two husbands, and with her son, and finally with her grandson) that she faced during her long life in America.

The novel also shows Lily’s great courage and a few compassionate people who helped her to cope. I read this book until late in… show more.

What could be more Irish than two old friends meeting in a pub to tell stories?

Thing is, one of the friends has a life-changing secret to tell. He’s left his wife and kids for another woman, a woman they both know from their school days. Throughout the night, in pub after pub, and pint after pint, the story of the friend’s new love is revealed as the conversation delves deeper into each man’s version of the past they have shared—their fathers, their lovers, and even their collective memories of their Irish childhoods.

At times the story is both amusing and genuinely moving. 

A beautiful, sad, poignant book about the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918, taking place in Dublin, Ireland where it hit young pregnant women doubly hard.

Very timely as it was published in the first year of the recent pandemic, making it especially resonate. The author is a master at creating suspense in a tiny space, basically one room.

I chose this short book because it casts light on a hidden history—that of faction fighting. Contrary to widespread belief, factions were not confined to rural areas in Ireland, nor were they a wholly nineteenth-century phenomenon. Kelly’s book provides a detailed account of the development of factions in eighteenth-century Dublin, from the Kevan Bail to the Ormond and Liberty Boys (and other little-known factions), and vividly describes the periodic disorder associated with them as they tried to establish control in the city. Kelly also outlines how the city’s economic and demographic growth led to the social conditions which nurtured factionalism, and he traces changes in the nature of factionalism as the eighteenth century progressed. An enthralling read about a topic that has often gone under the historiographical radar!