The great escape: what are you reading this summer? 

SINÉAD GLEESON

WRITER

A lot of my reading this year has been work or research so I’m excited to tackle the TBR pile. It’s been a great year for Irish fiction: Una Mannion’s gripping A Crooked Tree (Faber & Faber), and Louise Kennedy’s funny, smart stories The End of the World is a Cul de Sac (Bloomsbury) are standouts. I’m really looking forward to Eimear Ryan’s Holding Her Breath (Penguin), Evelyn Conlon’s stories Moving About the Place (Blackstaff Press) and Ed O’Loughlin’s This Eden (Riverrun).

Short books are ideal for holidays and I loved recent reissued novels by Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg (also a brilliant essayist) — The Dry Heart (Daunt Books), and The Road to the City (Daunt Books) — one about murder, the other about youthful longing. Mrs Caliban (New Directions), a 1982 novella just republished (about a woman who has an affair with a frog/man) by Rachel Ingalls, is a joy. Akwaeke Emezi’s Dear Senthuran (Penguin Random House) is a stunning memoir written in letters in a language all of its own.

RICHARD CHAMBERS

JOURNALIST AND WRITER OF THE UPCOMING ‘A STATE OF EMERGENCY’

Over a weekend break recently, I devoured Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly (Little Brown). The Derry writer’s account of childhood, brought up by his dad with his 10 siblings after the death of his mother, is incredibly touching but also ludicrously funny.

I found myself laughing hysterically at an alarmingly regular rate at his absurd takes on his upbringing and Irish life in the 1990s. Equal parts heart-warming and hilarious, it’s highly recommended. Grown Ups by Marian Keyes (Penguin) is a gem. Marian is seen as a national treasure and her latest book is an engrossing read, full of warmth, humour and understanding. Her insight into human nature is unparalleled.

It’s a great starter for people who’ve yet to dive into the Keyes back catalogue and the perfect holiday read.

A senior politician had nudged me many times over the course of 2020 to pick up Albert Camus’s The Plague (Simon & Schuster). I held off for a long time but ordered a copy online and was blown away by it. It’s no beach read but a deeply fascinating tale of the devastation of pandemics by one of the 20th century’s great minds. So much of what Camus writes here is eerily prescient of the sufferings visited upon us by coronavirus. The sacrifices of the book’s heroic Dr Rieux mirror those made by our own frontliners over the last year and a half. It’s a story wrapped in the resilience of community and the most indomitable characteristic of our species — hope.

JAN CARSON

WRITER

As a child my favourite thing about holidays was visiting the library to stock up on reading material. I was the big reader in the family and was usually able to scoop up everyone else’s unused library tickets. I’d always include at least one Agatha Christie novel in my stash because I enjoyed escaping into her twisted plots. I still read Christie on holidays. I’d recommend starting with the brilliant and terrifying And Then There Were None (HarperCollins). Holiday reading is all about losing yourself in a really great story and forgetting the anxieties you’ve left at home.

I’ve recently read a few fantastic novels so all-consuming I was pinned to the sofa all afternoon. If you’re looking for an immersive read try Una Mannion’s tense and beautifully written coming-of-age novel A Crooked Tree or Louise Nealon’s funny, honest and genuinely moving Snowflake (Manilla Press); a completely fresh take on the “girl goes to Trinity” novel which will break your heart in the very best way.

My final tip for a great holiday read is Grown Ups by Norwegian writer Marie Aubert (Pushkin, translated by Rosie Hedger). It’s a slim but powerful novel set in a summer home where tensions arise when the extended family gather to celebrate a birthday.

JOHN BANVILLE

WRITER

The other day in Hodges Figgis, that haven of peace and sanity in a mad and cacophonous world, I chanced upon The Empress of Ireland, by Christopher Robbins, first published in 2004 and now reissued in a handsome little volume from the splendidly named Slightly Foxed Editions. It’s hard to understand how this wonderful memoir of the life and adventures of the Irish film director, Brian Desmond Hurst, is not famous, for it’s as extravagantly entertaining as The Ginger Man, though Hurst was of a decidedly different sexual persuasion than the tirelessly womanising Sebastian Dangerfield.

Another “life and loves” portrait is Julia Parry’s The Shadowy Third (Duckworth), an account of a troubled love affair between her grandfather, the Dickens scholar Humphry House, and the novelist Elizabeth Bowen. The narrative, involving a cache of old letters and a quest for the story behind them, is the stuff of a plot by Bowen herself. Parry writes beautifully and always entertainingly.

Yet another quest, a most peculiar and fascinating one, is described in Ferdinand Mount’s Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca (Bloomsbury). Mount’s aunt was a self-invented, larger-than-life-sized adventurer and inveterate liar, whose story stretches from some of the great houses of England to the grimy back streets of late-Victorian Sheffield. Mount is a former editor of the Times Literary Supplement, and his elegantly written book is funny and sad, and captivating throughout.

A great tonic for long-isolated minds is Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland (Penguin). Rovelli, a physicist and best-selling author, here tells the story of how the 23-year-old Werner Heisenberg, a chronic sufferer from hay fever, sought relief for his condition on the virtually barren island of Heligoland off the German coast in 1925. There, single-handedly, he laid the foundations of quantum mechanics, devising, as Rovelli writes, “the only fundamental theory about the world that … has never been found wrong”. It’s a thrilling story, written with Rovelli’s accustomed wit and panache. After reading him, you’ll look at the grains of beach sand between your toes with an entirely new eye.

Two lamentably brief mentions: A Very Strange Man (New Island), the writer Alannah Hopkin’s loving account of her life with one of our finest literary artists, Aidan Higgins; and Intimate City (Gallery Books), the poet Peter Sirr’s love letters to Dublin in the form of beautifully crafted essays.

RUTH MEDJBER
PHOTOGRAPHER & WRITER

I’m a visual reader so I’m always packing art and photography magazines. Put me in a magazine shop and I’m a total spendthrift. Finding the really good stuff in Ireland is difficult so you have to subscribe. Alternatively, you can hope for a layover in an English-speaking city (ideally London or New York) and load up on amazing titles while you can. I’ve been known to check in an extra bag just to cart home my magazine haul. If you are in any way interested in cutting edge, contemporary photography, you need to subscribe to GUP. It’s a petite read full of all the exciting new trends in fine art photography. Its tiny size matches your A5 Bullet journal, meaning you can take it anywhere.

If you like to think outside the photography box and take your inspiration from architecture, painting and everything else, try Aesthetica and Juxtapoz (tip: follow both on Twitter/Instagram to brighten your daily timeline, they post incredible bits). If you’d prefer something Irish, we have Source Magazine, dedicated to Irish photography. The design can be a little drab at times, and it lacks a contemporary feel, but a good source of current Irish exhibitions if nothing else.

CAELAINN HOGAN

WRITER

At the moment I am reading Rosaleen McDonagh’s debut book of essays Unsettled, published by Skein Press this August. It is an intimate and radical testament to her experience, as an Irish Traveller writing from a feminist perspective, that lays bare systemic violence and rejects easy narratives, while embodying diverse experiences of what it is to be Irish.

I recently picked up a copy of Joanna Walsh’s new polyphonic novel Seed from the brilliant independent No Alibis bookshop in Belfast along with the brilliant Susan McKay’s latest Northern Protestants on Shifting Ground (Blackstaff Press). I’m looking forward to reading Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe’s poetry collection Auguries of a Minor God (Faber) along with Paul McVeigh’s new anthology The 32: An Anthology of Irish Working Class Voices (Unbound), and Awaeke Emezi’s memoir Dear Senthuran (Riverhead Books) , having been completely immersed in their novel Freshwater. If you get a chance, watch a collaborative video, available on YouTube, for a striking new poem by Annemarie Ní Churreáin called A Blessing of the Boats by the Village Mothers, as part of The Lighthouse Project.

DR KEVIN POWER

WRITER AND ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF LITERARY PRACTICE, TCD 

I was late getting to both Rachel Cusk’s Transit (2016, Faber) and Ali Smith’s Autumn (2017, Hamish Hamilton), but I finally read them earlier this summer and am extremely glad that I did. Each book is an entry in a longer sequence: Transit is the middle volume of Cusk’s Outline trilogy, and Autumn is the first entry in Smith’s seasonal quartet. But you can happily read them as standalones.

Both Smith and Cusk are trying to push the realist novel in new directions. Transit is narrated by a novelist, Faye, who has left her husband and moved into a new flat in London — a standard set-up. But Cusk makes Faye recede as a narrative presence. She becomes a sort of half-invisible recording angel, listening, largely without comment, to the self-revealing soliloquiesof the people she meets: her hairdresser, her Polish builder, an old romantic partner. There is no plot: only people, constructing themselves, explaining their lives. The novel is about change: how people evade it, embrace it, pursue it; the damage it can do; the illuminations it can bring. This sounds a tad forbidding. But the prose is crystalline, the characters are brilliantly rendered. The book speeds by.

Autumn does have a plot, and a very moving one: Elisabeth, a lecturer in art history, visits Daniel, the elderly neighbour who rescued her from loneliness as a child, in a nursing home. Meanwhile, the Brexit referendum divides Britain. The textures of the writing are rough, often crude (the novel was written and published quickly, a process that is itself a kind of experiment with novelistic form). But this is the point: our reactions to the contemporary world aren’t polished but rather crude, improvised, tonally uncertain. Autumn contains dream sequences, prose poems, excursions into social satire and feminist art criticism, jumbled together. The whole thing should be a mess. But it superbly coheres around its emotional core: the love of Elisabeth and Daniel for each other.

I may have been late to the party. But the best thing about my approaching holiday is that I have more books by Ali Smith and Rachel Cusk to take with me.

DONAL RYAN

WRITER

You know you’re in the right job when some of the best books you read in the year are written by your colleagues. My holiday recommendations come straight from the University of Limerick: Sarah Moore Fitzgerald continues her unstoppable ascent to YA superstardom with All the Money in the World (Orion Children’s Books), a masterfully plotted and beautifully wrought rags-to-riches fable set among the “elite” of south Dublin, with wonderfully worked-out themes of class division, snobbery, self-image, friendship, family and belonging. This book will engage, move and entertain all the family — a proof copy did the rounds of our estate this spring and was passed from child to parent and loved by all.

Also from UL’s green and giving campus, Sheila Killian’s staggeringly accomplished, meticulously researched and unbelievably gripping debut, Something Bigger (Caritas Press), follows 14-year-old Marcella Coyle from Ireland to Alabama where she joins her brother, a fortitudinous Catholic priest pitted against the terrible power of the Ku Klux Klan. It’s a story of integrity, love, loyalty and friendship, and a stark illumination of Irish emigrant politics and racial and sectarian strife through the first half of the 20th century.

Two unputdownable books to leave the virus-ridden world behind and get lost in. Don’t forget to top up your sunscreen.

LYNN RUANE

WRITER AND SENATOR 

Year Book by Seth Rogen (audiobook, Crown Publishing) had me in stitches of laughter through the third lockdown. It’s his own voice, which I always prefer, and there are lots of special guests featured throughout; it is some easy listening in comparison to what I’m reading, which is the amazing Albert Camus (Simon and Schuster).

I started with The Fall and I’m now on The Plague. Reading The Plague, I really wonder if we have learned anything as humans. Camus could have been writing about Covid times. He is an amazing humanistic writer and easy to read even if you don’t read much philosophy.

HOLLY WHITE

WRITER AND VEGAN CHEF

This is It by Conor Creighton (Gill Books) is a great story and a practical introduction to meditation in a grounded way. And if anyone has watched The Crown, they will love Lady in Waiting: My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown by Anne Glenconner, (Hodder & Stoughton).

Lastly Where the Crawdads Sing (Little Brown) is a lovely story with a great twist. It is soon to be a movie with Normal People’s Daisy Edgar-Jones. Great to read the book before the movie comes along, if you haven’t already.

OLIVER CALLAN

SATIRIST, COLUMNIST AND IMPRESSIONIST

The book I always recommend to everyone because it’s perfect for those who either read two books a year or an attic load: John Boyne’s The Heart’s Invisible Furies (Transworld). It distils Ireland into a 700-plus page-turning romp filled with craic, sadness, hilarious and despicable characters and twists. It might be a nightmare to be on holiday with someone who’s reading this if you haven’t read it, because they’ll be exclaiming out loud, laughing, and then wiping their eyes a few pages later, and you’ll want to know why. It’s a masterpiece and no one has ever complained after being recommended it.

It goes through history in seven-year leaps, so if you prefer something that is very of-the-minute, then John’s latest novel The Echo Chamber (Doubleday) is the ticket. A very funny take on cancel culture, influencers and wokeism (published tomorrow).

You can’t go wrong with a Liz Nugent — Skin Deep (Penguin) is especially magnificent, as is Our Little Cruelties (Penguin).

I’ve just finished Séamas O’Reilly’s Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?, a childhood memoir that is full of comedy despite recounting the astonishing family graft in surviving the death of his Mammy when he was five, amongst 11 children in the 1990s.

The story is terribly sad and funny simultaneously and you’ll fall for his heroic, stoic father who just gets on with the impossible, without a fuss, even when at one point six of his daughters become teenagers at the same time.

For kids, I have bookworm nephews and their favourite recommendation of mine recently was The Stormkeeper’s Island (Bloomsbury Publishing). It’s part of a hugely imaginative adventure series written by Catherine Doyle; the boys are 11 and 13 and adored it and got the sequels so quickly they had them all devoured before I could even give them as gifts.

All my choices here are Irish—for holiday reads there’s no need to leave the island for the force of writing talent here.

SARAH BREEN

WRITER

A good holiday read must have plenty of plot, which is why you’ll always find at least one crime novel in my suitcase.

Set in Cork, Catherine Ryan Howard’s The Nothing Man (Corvus) is a book within a book that follows a notorious serial killer and the survivor who is determined to catch him 20 years after he murdered her entire family. If you find yourself somewhere hot and sticky, it will do a damn fine job of making your blood run cold.

Snowflake by Louise Nealon is not about a hyper-sensitive millennial. In fact, its protagonist Debbie is quite the opposite, having been reared on a dairy farm by an eccentric mother with the help of an alcoholic uncle who lives in a caravan in their garden.

When Debbie swaps the milking shed for the hallowed lecture halls of Trinity College, she’s forced to confront her own mental health issues through new friendships and experiences. With an unexpected dream-related sub-plot, it’s not your typical coming-of-age novel.

The chapters in Boys Don’t Cry (Faber) by Fíona Scarlett alternate between two brothers, Joe, 17, and Finn, 12, who live in a tower block in inner city Dublin with their ma while their da is in prison. A beautiful examination of brotherly love and the ties that bind us, I was inconsolable when I finished it.

IAN ROBERTSON

CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST AND WRITER

For fiction, I would recommend Nora by Nuala O’Connor (New Island), the beautifully-written novel of Nora Barnacle’s life, love and lust with James Joyce. For non-fiction, to cheer us all up amidst apocalypse anxiety, I recommend the brilliant page-turner — Humankind by Rutger Bregman(Bloomsbury Publishing).

EMMA GLEESON

WRITER

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett (Riverhead Books) is a vivid world to get lost in, exploring themes of family, race, gender that rips from the first page.

I read The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) six months ago and I still miss it. Set between the 2000s and 16th century London this is an epic tale of Jewish history, feminism and philosophy with the pace of a thriller.

Handiwork by Sara Baume (Tramp Press) is a balm for the soul. A beautiful meditation on art, grief and nature, it will slow you down.

Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm by Isabella Tree (Picador). If you want to sink into the natural world while you’re away, this beautifully written memoir will drive home the interconnectedness of everything in nature. If you like short stories, Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber) are word perfect, each one loosely themed around music.

And I would add The Best Catholics in the World by Derek Scally (Penguin Books),— it’s not exactly a chill holiday book but I think everyone should read it.

DARA McANULTY

WRITER

If truth be told, I’m not a fan of summer, the brightness of the light, the long swathes of unplanned time stretched out as school breaks up for the holidays.

I’m autistic and both these things make summer my least favourite season, but one thing I do love is the endless reading time and so I love books that are long and keep me engaged.

My summer ritual over the last few years is to re-read The Lord of the Rings trilogy but the sweltering heat of this summer so far, has left me restless and unable to focus. So, poetry and short stories have been lifesavers. The 32:An Anthology of Irish Working Class Voices (Unbound), edited by Paul McVeigh, is fantastic. Intimate, illuminative and heartfelt. Unique voices soaring with honesty and humour. Highly recommend.

The Heeding by Rob Cowen (Elliot & Thompson), a new collection of pandemic-inspired poetry is deeply felt and visceral. I wasn’t sure if I would enjoy it to be honest, as people are still living through this period and still steeped in grief, but I found a comfort in it and the illustrations by Nick Hayes are also wonderful.

Intimacies by Lucy Caldwell (Faber) is exceptional. I think it’s really important for young men who love literature to read modern books by women. Caldwell writes with delicacy and such beauty.

I’m in the middle of Jan Carson’s The Fire Starters (Transworld), which is gripping, exciting, inventive and truly thrilling and I need to get back to it asap.

OLA MAJEKODUNMI

JOURNALIST & BROADCASTER

My recommendations are Girl, Woman, Other (Hamish Hamilton) by Bernadine Evaristo and Why Solange Matters (Faber) by Stephanie Phillips; I am currently reading them both.

NIALL BOURKE

WRITER

Although we won’t be going on our usual French camping trip this summer, I’m still hoping to get away somewhere local and finally catch up on (some of) the reading I neglected earlier in the year.

There has been a whole host of rave-reviewed Irish debuts released since January, and this holiday I’ll be packing two I’ve yet to get to — Boys Don’t Cry by Fíona Scarlett and White City by Kevin Power (Simon & Schuster).

Since reading Giovanni’s Room recently, I’ve become a bit obsessed with James Baldwin (Dial Press), so I’ll be bringing his set of hugely timely essays The Fire Next Time. Shamefully, I’ve never read anything by Kazuo Ishiguro, so I’ll also be bringing Remains of the Day (Faber), and although five books might be a bit ambitious, lastly I am going to pack Hyperion by Dan Simmons (Doubleday) — a Hugo Award-winning reworking of

The Canterbury Tales set on a spaceship and narrated by a group of mysterious inter-stellar pilgrim. Enough said.

ELAINE FEENEY

WRITER

Summer is my favourite time for reading and there’s no shortage of superb books out now. I’ve just finished The Rules of Revelation (John Murray Press) by Lisa McInerney — the final novel in her epic trilogy, following the mad world of Ryan Cusack. Expect the terrific pace and crackling dialogue we have come to enjoy from McInerney.

Claire-Louise Bennett’s Checkout 19 (Jonathan Cape) is out soon and tells of a young woman and her life of books. Reading Bennett’s work is an event, and this novel is a fitting follow-up to her outstanding debut, Pond.

I was very moved by Kazuo Ishiguro’s beautiful novel, Klara and the Sun (Faber ), blown away by Louise Kennedy’s heart-breaking debut collection of short stories, The End of the World is a Cul de Sac, and for poetry lovers, Victoria Kennefick’s new collection, Eat or we Both Starve (Carcanet press), and Stephen Sexton’s Cheryl’s Destinies (Penguin) are two of the finest collections I’ve read in a long time. Finally, for the daring reader, Nightbitch (Penguin) by Rachel Yoder is a most compelling and unnerving novel.