Finishing a novel for Colum McCann feels like finishing a PhD. He upends the traditional maxim to “write what you know” in favour of writing “what you want to know”.

Joyce’s funny, moving and infuriating masterpiece should send us, not into the cold and sterile embrace of the examination room, but out again into the warm and throbbing world.

All is very far from what it seems in a literary mystery novel by poet Ciaran Carson set in Belfast and Paris.

Edna O’Brien’s memoir refuses to satisfy our curiosity or submit to the demands for interpretation. She has fought others’ desire for control from childhood, and in her eighties is still fighting.

Fate dealt harshly with both JG Farrell and Stewart Parker, two hugely gifted Irish writers who died in their forties

A historical novel based on a fourteenth century Hiberno-Norman chieftain reminds us that Ireland was a multilingual and multicultural country long before any of us were born.

George O’Brien’s impressive survey of fifty years of the Irish novel is inclusive, eclectic and insistently diverse.

The idea of retreat or retrenchment might surprise those who see nothing but good in the present, with its ceaselessly productive creative arts, but Derek Mahon wants nothing to do with this cheerful complacency.

Of the love poems, the two outstanding examples are by an archbishop of Tuam, Maol Mhuire Ó hUigín. One is addressed to a young man called Eoghan, but the point is to warn this youth not to fall in love…

There are things you can do when your husband sleeps with your sister. You can sit in your studio and imagine them together, the toad and the mouse. Him moving over her. Her on top of him. You can hear…