Fiction

Love in the Dark

A love-across-the-divide story from the North - with a difference

Literature

The Past is a Place

Stories from the North about trying to stay ahead of the past

Literature

Back to the Future

A magical realist lens on the life of the loyalist village of ‘Ballylack’

Literary Life

Haunted Houses

Elizabeth Bowen’s love letters recall her first extramarital affair

Endgame

In Elizabeth Bowen’s novel ‘The Last September’, the young heroine is on the cusp of independence, as indeed is, on a separate track, the country…

Irish Politics

Remembering Lyra

‘We were the Good Friday Agreement generation,’ wrote the journalist Lyra McKee, shot dead by the New IRA while working in Derry a year ago,…

Irish Literature

The State of Us

Elaine Feeney combines linguistic verve, biting irony and unflinching commentary on modern Ireland to produce a tragicomic tour-de-force. Shocking, exhilarating and life-affirming, ‘As You Were’…

Irish Literature

There and Then

Violence begets violence, Darran Anderson reflects. Those immersed in it know it; those who profit from it at a distance know it even more. What…

World Literature

Telling Tales

Zadie Smith has said that she is not by nature a political person, her business as a writer rather being ‘the intimate lives of people’.…

Irish Literature

Urban Myths

There are – at least – two sides to everything. Jan Carson’s new novel skilfully blends magic realism, absurdism and surrealism to explore the complexities…

Irish Literature

Love in the Time of Austerity

An artful, nuanced take on life in post-Tiger Ireland, Sally Rooney’s Normal People is a breathtaking reflection on love and unequal exchange between two people…

Irish Literature

Gender in Conflict

Anna Burns’s new novel explores the impact in the Northern Ireland of the 1970s of a level of violence that has become ordinary and a…

Irish Literature

Homing Signals

Leontia Flynn’s latest collection, which was shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize, gives shape to the ‘music of words’ that reverberates within our quotidian existence,…

Irish Literature

Storied Women

A companion volume to Sinéad Gleeson’s ‘The Long Gaze Back’ charts the unique tradition of short fiction by women from the North of Ireland. Gleeson…