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There are Irish writers everyone knows they ought to have read. They sit reproachfully on shelves, win major prizes and appear in newspaper photographs looking thoughtful beside stone walls.
This is a slightly different list.
These are writers you may already know, particularly if you spend an indecent amount of time browsing bookshops, but whose work deserves to travel beyond the reading circles that have already claimed them. Some are writing literary fiction. One has written a memoir about the peculiar economics of trying to be a writer. Others are working in fantasy, horror and queer coming-of-age fiction.
I have also just realised that five of my official seven are women. Having spent years hearing about programmes encouraging people to read more women, I appear to have overshot and may now need to establish my own corrective initiative: Read More Men.
Alan and Jamie, no pressure, but you are currently carrying the entire programme.
Set in Donegal in 1994, The Coast Road is about women living inside marriages which have consumed far more of them than anyone notices.
Murrin writes Izzy perfectly. I know this woman. She would be an intensely irritating, competitive frenemy. I would dread her arriving when the dishes were still out. She would notice whatever you hoped nobody had noticed and make you feel you had failed an exam you did not know existed.
She is also exactly who you would want beside you when something had to be fought, organised or sorted out.
There is a conversation inside Izzy about how much talent and energy Ireland wasted in women like her. Give that intelligence nowhere useful to go and it turns towards managing houses, husbands, committees, reputations and other women. Murrin sees her abrasiveness, her power and the reasons she is difficult. That is far more interesting than making her likeable.
The novel is set as Ireland approaches the 1995 divorce referendum, and Murrin never lets us forget how few practical choices were available to women whose marriages had gone wrong.
I read The Lightning shortly after Michael Pedersen's Muckle Flugga, so another lighthouse, another island and another group of lonely people made me wonder whether I had entered a very specific reading phase.
The novels share isolation, ageing, landscape, visitors, community, companionship and dignity. They are also worlds apart. Universes, really.
That is the wonder of language and imagination. Give two writers rock, sea, weather and people who cannot say what they need, and they build entirely different realities.
On Wolf Island, Guiney makes solitude feel like freedom, habit, punishment and protection. The arrival of visitors disturbs the emotional arrangements that have allowed people to continue, while the island itself feels intimate rather than empty. The natural world is never scenery sitting politely behind the humans. It presses against them and shapes how they live.
The Lightning is original, beautifully observed and big-hearted. It understands that companionship is not always rescue.
Wild Iris is beautiful. Spare, but somehow lush.
McKee does not crowd the page, yet the novel feels full of memory, dread, friendship, motherhood and the private weather inside Eve's mind.
Set across an Easter weekend, it follows Eve towards her forty-second birthday and a psychological crisis, moving through past and present with the convincing logic of a mind circling what it cannot face.
It absolutely does not read like a first novel. There is no sense that McKee is nervously showing us everything she can do or arranging her themes where they can be admired. She trusts the reader and she trusts silence. The prose is precise without becoming cold, emotionally fearless without becoming theatrical.
I finished it and continued thinking about it.
Some books end. Wild Iris remains in the room.
Caitríona Lally, Home Economics
I read Home Economics in one sitting because Caitríona Lally's mind is excellent company.
I had already read “Night-Rule in Nighttown”, her essay on the “Circe” episode of Ulysses in The Book About Everything, edited by Declan Kiberd, Enrico Terrinoni and Catherine Wilsdon. I thought then that Lally was made for observation and commentary. She notices the absurd structures people accept as ordinary and can stand slightly outside an experience without withdrawing.
That quality is even more impressive when the life under observation is her own.
Home Economics covers cleaning at Trinity, writing, money, childbirth, motherhood and the financial lunacy of making books. It is unsentimental and never navel-gazing. Lally examines exhaustion, work and ambition clearly while remaining deeply kind and connected to the people around her.
She also refuses the convenient inspirational version of the writer-cleaner story. Cleaning is skilled work, with camaraderie, repetition and dignity. It is not included merely to make literary success look more remarkable. Writing is work too, except the economics are frequently deranged.
Chloe Michelle Howarth, Sunburn
Sunburn took me back to being young in an Ireland that was changing, but had not changed yet.
Lucy falls in love with Susannah in a small Cork town in the early 1990s. Howarth captures the terrible concentration of adolescence, when one person can become the weather and the only future worth imagining.
Lucy has already absorbed the rules. She knows what can be said, what must be hidden and what kind of life will make everyone else comfortable. Those who remember that Ireland will recognise the silences, even where our own secrets were different.
There is something painfully accurate in the way Howarth writes the mixture of fear, longing and self-deception involved in trying to keep both the person you love and the approval of the world around you.
Sunburn is tender, sensual and angry. It allows first love to be glorious without pretending love automatically gives a frightened teenager the power to defy her entire world.
Sarah Rees Brennan, Long Live Evil
Having recently listened to Sarah Rees Brennan speaking in Chapters, I can confirm that the speed, wit and intelligence of the books are not manufactured on the page. This is simply how her mind moves.
You leave entertained, breathless and aware that she made six serious points while you were still laughing at the first joke.
Long Live Evil sends Rae, a young woman dying of cancer, into the fantasy series she loves. She lands in a villain's body and uses her knowledge of the books to survive. It is theatrical, clever and gleefully aware of every fantasy convention it is dismantling.
There is real anger beneath the fun. Brennan, herself a cancer survivor, understands seeking refuge in stories when the body has become frightening and the future has narrowed. She also understands that fictional characters become considerably more complicated when you find yourself standing in front of them.
The sequel, All Hail Chaos, is now out, so nobody has to behave patiently after the first book's ending.
Sarah Maria Griffin, Eat the Ones You Love
Eat the Ones You Love contains a florist's shop, a half-empty suburban Dublin shopping centre, bruised people trying to begin again and Baby, a sentient orchid with an appetite for human flesh.
As someone who works in retail, I was willing to accept that the monster might be the least alarming part.
Griffin understands the eerie sadness of shopping centres and the intimacy of work: petty hierarchies, private jokes, loyalties and strange little families formed by people who would never otherwise have met.
She is also very good on those parts of suburban Dublin that rarely make it into fashionable novels. The Woodbine Crown is neither a glittering city-centre department store nor the polished fantasy of Dundrum. It is built from the shopping centres many of us actually know, where people work, wait, drift through and occasionally disappear.
The book is funny, dark and gloriously peculiar. Griffin uses monsters to get closer to the truth about burnout, desire, housing, class and needing to belong somewhere badly enough that you stop asking what it costs.
Yes, this is number eight. I dislike being kept to a number.
Dirtpickers is set in an Idaho mining community across several voices and timelines, it has the breadth and violence of an American western, alongside the intimacy of damaged people attempting to become a family.
I found it almost impossible to connect the confidence and authority of the book with a young debut writer from Meath. Not because a Meath writer should not command Idaho, but because Hand writes as though she has inhabited this world for decades.
The voice never wobbles. The novel never asks permission.
The writing is blazingly vivid, sometimes brutally so, but the violence does not swallow the tenderness. Hand is interested in survival, loyalty and what people construct from the wreckage left by dangerous men.
If you have not heard of Edie May Hand, it is because you have not heard of her yet.
That is the joy of a bookshop: meeting a new voice and wanting to hear everything it has to say.
