World Literature

Home As Hell

Tara Westover’s childhood was dominated by her father’s apocalyptic beliefs. She was born at home, and never had a birth certificate. She never went to…

Irish Literature

Bleak New World

Julian Gough’s new novel portrays a world that we are already well on the way to – one in which human concerns are very much…

Irish Literature

Folks Like Us

The central characters in Bernard MacLaverty’s ‘Midwinter Break’ are frail, contrary, inadequate, self-serving, self-destructive, hopeless, hopeful, desperate, kindly, thoughtless, and all the other things that…

Irish Literature

Playing with the Bits

Misery, Paul Muldoon would have us know, wasn’t just back then. We’re still mired in it. His pessimism is bracing but never depressing: this has…

Irish Literature

A Great Delight, A Little Load

Peter Fallon’s version of the Greek poet Hesiod’s best-known work avoids the traps of exaggerated fidelity to ancient poetic protocol and wilful anachronism. There is…

Irish Literature

War in Words

And by wars what he had in mind, Gerald Dawe went on to explain, were not only those that one might expect Irish poets to…

Irish Literature

Sound, from Top to Toe

The work of the Fermanagh poet and editor Frank Ormsby is notable for its quietness, its lucidity, its scrupulous particularity and specificity, its modesty (there…

Irish Literature

A Life in Books

Denis Sampson’s memoir has no major dramas, and all its crises are inward and personal. Nevertheless it gives readers a sense of what constitutes the…