Like any new habit, the beginning is crucial. Whether it’s fitness or starting a new diet, the way you begin often dictates how long you stick with it.
The same can be said for the book you choose to break out of that reading slump with. Pick the right one and it will remind you of why you fell in love with reading in the first place.
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Taking place in a single day, six astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) complete 16 orbits, witnessing 16 sunrises and sunsets.
The living quarters are close but the astronauts are a world away from one another.
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If you feel as though you have been pulled out of the orbit of your regular reading habits, this 140-page novel will draw you back in until the last page.
Foster by Claire Keegan
In 1981, a young girl is sent to live with foster parents on a farm in Co Wicklow while her mother prepares to give birth.
In the strangers’ house she encounters unfamiliar affection. Small moments like a hand on a shoulder, a walk to the well, a biscuit carefully placed on the counter, allow her to slowly blossom. She begins to see what true love looks like for the first time.
Foster was turned into Colm Bairéad’s 2021 Irish-language adaptation An Cailín Ciúin.
Normal People by Sally Rooney
Normal People has defined a generation of readers and writers. If you haven’t read Sally Rooney’s sophomore novel yet, then maybe now is the time.
Connell and Marianne grow up together in the same small town in Co Sligo, but that is where their similarities end. Despite differences in class, social status and everything else that holds importance in a small rural town, the two have a connection.
In the years that follow, Connell and Marianne, despite their intentions, keep finding each other. But is their connection alone enough to keep them together?
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Kansas, two men on a dirt road, the Clutter family farm, four gunshots.
Long before streaming platforms blurred the lines between fact and fiction and turned true crime into a lucrative genre, Truman Capote did it first with In Cold Blood.
The groundbreaking “non-fiction” novel recounts the brutal 1959 murders of the Clutter family and provides an acute dissection of the men who did it.
Capote’s noble, or not so noble, pursuit of truth is as chilling as the crime itself, subtly bending our moral compass until the monsters on the page begin to appear disturbingly human.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
If one large story feels too daunting to start with, try 20 bite-sized ones.
These are stories about small towns, seemingly small lives and all-consuming cities where a life becomes small; about dark corners in the mind; about the escape that driving down the freeways of the Golden Coast offers despite what lies at the end of the road.
Joan Didion takes us with her on a journey across the US with the car roof down to learn the sobering lesson that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the fair, and that the US is not what it once was.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
She has everything; the apartment, the degree from Columbia, the inheritance, but something is missing. She thinks she may have the solution.
She is going to take a year under sedation to relax and hide away from the world.
Ottessa Moshfegh’s tale of a woman trying to find purpose in a world where everything is worshipped, and nothing is valued is dark, funny and completely singular.
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
A young American travels to 1950s Paris, while waiting for his fiancee to return from a holiday in Spain. There he meets Giovanni, an Italian barman - the two men are drawn into an intense affair, and everything that was once known to both of them is changed.
When his fiancee returns, he is faced with a choice that will lead to tragic consequences for everyone.
The Ice Palace by Tarej Vesaas
“It is unique. It is unforgettable. It is extraordinary,” wrote novelist Doris Lessing about this Norwegian classic, The Ice Palace.
Two 11-year-old girls, Unn and Siss, strike up a sudden and intense friendship, but when Unn disappears into a frozen waterfall Siss is left to deal with her grief and a mystery in a desolate Norwegian town. It is simple, eerily quiet and magical.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
This is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Imagine an almost 300-page poem of someone speaking their deepest and darkest thoughts, both beautiful and brutal.
Ocean Vuong’s novel is a lyrical and intimate doorway into the parts of a boy’s life that his mother would never know until it was all too late.
A reflective and contemplative story that slowly arches towards an unforgettable revelation.
Show Them A Good Time by Nicole Flattery
A young woman feeling lost in the motions of New York; a schoolteacher navigates love and sex in today’s dating world; two college students take to the stage to try to find autonomy under the spotlight. Every character is searching for something while everything teeters towards utter ruin.
Nicole Flattery’s characters in this collection of short stories are haunted by their past and potential futures, causing ruptures in their everyday lives.
Whatever path you think these characters are guiding you down, they are leading you in the opposite direction in the most bizarre and entertaining way.
