Book Club

The Irish Times Book Club newsletter. Sign up for features, reviews, short stories, podcasts and more

Colm Tóibín’s Long Island is Waterstones Irish Book of the Year

Books newsletter: A preview of Saturday’s pages; Richard Flanagan wins Baillie Gifford Prize; Irish translator wins Stephen Spender Prize; MS Readathon; (S)worn State(s) launch at MoLI; Never Too Late Award; Dublin Literary Award judges; Limerick Writers’ Centre launch; Rory Brennan dies

Vona Groarke wins 2024 Michel Déon Prize

Books newsletter: a preview of Saturday’s pages; PEN Heaney Prize and Waterstones Book of the Year shortlists; Writers in the Attic; Robert Fisk archive at TCD; Little Island’s Carnegie success

A tribute to Nell McCafferty

Books newsletter: Irish Writers’ Weekend in London; Kit de Waal to judge Women’s Prize for Fiction; Oscar Wilde exhibition; Korean prize for Anna Burns

Circling The Square hits the spot

Books newsletter: Forward prizes; Baillie Gifford shortlist; Claire Keegan wins Lenz Prize; Bookshop of the Year; Writer of Courage 2024; Tanya Sweeney book deal; Leaves Festival; Macavity Awards

Anne Haverty to give Stinging Fly annual lecture

Books newsletter: Tomorrow’s pages; Irish judges for Nero awards; Rooney Writer Fellow; ISLA, Bram Stoker, IMRAM and Murder One festivals; Irish Book Week; Publishers for Palestine

Freyja Hellebust wins Gerald Griffin Competition

Books newsletter: Saturday’s pages; Belfast International Arts Festival; Red Line Book Festival; TS Eliot lecture; Allingham Festival; Oisín Fagan book deal; Semaus Heaney fellows; In Their Shoes podcast

Children’s Books Ireland reading guide launched

Books newsletter: Saturday’s pages previewed; Wendy Erskine, Fíona Scarlett, Seán Farrell book deals; TCD arts festival; Italian book festival; Anne Enright event; Dayton Literary Peace Prize; MoLI seeks new director

Eimear McBride returns with new novel

Books newsletter: a wrap of the latest news and preview of Saturday’s pages

Joseph O’Connor headlines Letters for Life

Books newsletter: a wrap of the latest news and preview of Saturday’s pages

Mags McLoughlin appointed new head of Irish Writers Centre

Books newsletter: a wrap of the latest news and events and a preview of Saturday’s pages

Gillian Anderson to star in Channel 4 film of Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses

Books newsletter: a preview of tomorrow’s pages and a wrap of the latest news

Ferdia Lennon wins Waterstones prize

Books newsletter: a wrap of the latest news and a preview of Saturday’s pages

Vona Groake and Martina Evans honoured

Books newsletter: a wrap of the latest news and Saturday’s pages previewed

Chidi Ebere wins best debut over 50 prize

Books newsletter: a wrap of the latest news and preview of Saturday’s pages

The Anxious Generation: Jonathan Haidt lays out potential solutions to the crisis, all of which depend upon collective action

Haidt invites us to consider the many harms of the Great Rewiring in terms of the ‘opportunity cost’ of near total immersion in a virtual world

Garth Risk Hallberg’s The Second Coming: Bigger isn’t always better

Creaking under its own weight, at half the size this could have been twice as powerful

Una Mannion wins Gold Dagger Award

Books newsletter: a wrap of the latest news and preview of tomorrow’s pages

Rebecca Watson: ‘There’s a simpler way to tell the story. But it would feel less honest to me’

The author’s new book continues to play with layout to convey consciousness but spans a longer stretch of time than her debut

Myles Dungan: ‘Rural Ireland was riddled with class distinctions’

‘Agrarian insurgencies predated the struggle for independence. Most were far more prolonged, bloody and militarily effective than nationalist uprisings,’ says the historian

Wild Geese by Soula Emmanuel: Remakes emigration and its impact on relationships in an invigorating shape

The novel sets out to dismantle the gender binary while also dissecting it, all the time riffing with energy and insight on nostalgia

I Love You I Love You I Love You by Laura Dockrill: A ‘will they, won’t they, tale’, tinged with noughties nostalgia

The legacy of Dockrill’s young adult writing career is evident in chirpy proses that brims with exclamation marks, superlatives and capitalisations

David Nash wins Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize

Books newsletter: a roundup of the latest news and preview of Saturday’s pages

Chris Whitaker: ‘I sometimes wonder if the road I went down was linked to this violent act that happened when I was a kid’

A chance discovery in a library helped Whitaker overcome the trauma of a brutal stabbing and set him on the path to becoming a writer

Massacre in the Clouds: it is a fine work and will go some way to restoring this incident to the mainstream of history

The title is a pointed correction of the misnomer ‘the battle above the clouds’, by which the slaughter was known at the time

Summer reading: 21 great books for the holidays

This list has something for everyone with books covering dystopian realities, historical settings, criminal capers and familiar places

Soula Emmanuel wins SoA award

Books newsletter: a preview of Saturday’s pages and round-up of the latest news

John McGahern Prize for debut Irish fiction 2023 shortlist revealed

Prof Shovlin said, ‘Five years feels something like maturity for the prize and we were delighted to see, once again, a very strong field’

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE...

The Irish Times ePaper

Election 2024

Full general election coverage including analysis and results for all 43 constituencies

Common Ground

How does a post-Brexit world shape the identity and relationship of these islands