Book Review: You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty – Awaeke Emezi
"After a brilliant opening and strong first half, Emezi’s thoughtful modern romance ceases to be propelled by the organic development of its well-drawn characters." -
Book Review: The Quiet Whispers Never Stop – Olivia Fitzsimons
"This is not a ‘coming of age’ story, a love story, or a dissection of marriage; it’s all of these things at once, and somehow more nakedly raw than those…
Book Review: Lapvona – Ottessa Moshfegh
"Lapvona is the first of Moshfegh’s four novels to be written in the third person, signalling a turn towards questions of community and interdependence. How do we live together?" -…
Book Review: The Written World: Essays and Reviews – Kevin Power
"Who’d have thought: one can skewer the ludicrous Jordan Peterson while also admiring – not without qualification, of course – distinctly unfashionable writers like Amis, Jonathan Franzen and even the…
Book Review: Seven Steeples – Sara Baume
"This unique new offering from award-winning writer Sara Baume meditates on the humility and grandeur of love and nature with precision and lyricism." - Hannah Clarkson
Book Review: The Geometer Lobachevsky – Adrian Duncan
"The Geometer Lobachevsky remains a beautifully crafted synthesis of intellectual athleticism and aesthetic originality." - Pádraig Nolan
Book Review: Time is a Mother – Ocean Vuong
This is not poetry as a solution, but as a keening: ‘Lest we forget, a morgue is also a community center.’ And somehow life goes on.
Book Review: Homesickness – Colin Barrett
Along with those of writers like Kevin Barry and John Patrick McHugh, Colin Barrett’s stories brilliantly articulate the tragedy and comedy of rural Ireland. What’s more, they do so with…
Book Review: The Colony – Audrey Magee
Audrey Magee’s second novel is a beautifully-crafted meditation on art, language, memory and colonialism.
Book Review: Ulysses: A Reader’s Odyssey – Daniel Mulhall
Mulhall’s is far from the first ‘guide’ to Ulysses. However, what perhaps distinguishes his is its approachability.
Book Review: On Getting Better – Adam Phillips
In On Getting Better, as in his other works, Phillips both kindles optimism and chastens it. He is, as psychoanalysts tend to be, both attuned to human possibility and acutely…
Book Review: The Books of Jacob – Olga Tokarczuk
The novel that the Nobel prize committee described as Olga Tokarczuk’s ‘magnum opus so far'.
Book Review: The Dublin Architecture Guide, 1937-2021 – Paul Kelly, Cormac Murray and Brendan Spierin
"The Dublin Architecture Guide, 1937-1938 is a compact and beautifully organised curation of the city’s rich and diverse array of modern architecture." - Luke Warde
Book Review – The New Frontier: Reflections From the Irish Border Edited By James Conor Patterson
In the introduction to The New Frontier, Patterson writes that, “it would be crass to feign neutrality on a subject which has shaped who we are” and that the authors…
Book Review: The Magician – Colm Tóibín
"A compelling portrait of a gifted but flawed artist." - Paulie Doyle
Book Review: I, Antigone – Carlo Gébler
I, Antigone, as with Gébler’s other adaptations, is told in a simple, though at times lyrical manner that seems itself wary of crowding out what wisdom the contemporary reader might…
Book Review: Wunderland – Caitríona Lally
Wunderland is the much anticipated second novel of Rooney Prize-winning author Caitríona Lally. It’s a contemplation of language, of what’s lost and found in translation, commuting across the boundaries of…
Book Review: Exteriors – Annie Ernaux
"Exteriors is perhaps best enjoyed when leafed through at random." At the time of writing, Annie Ernaux is the favourite to win this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature...