If love is action, how does it move? This question is at the heart of a pair of debut novels by Anthony Shapland and Seán Hewitt which confront the intractable operations of love with exceptional clarity and verve. Both of these books describe the dilemma of desire from up close: you can practically see sparks as their characters dance across the latticework of erotic feeling, perpetually out of sync.

Kristen Poli Criticism 4th December 2025

“We have just come out of a ‘decade of centenaries’ commemorating and comprehensively analysing Ireland’s ‘revolutionary generation’. We stand to learn much about ourselves by giving the same attention to tracing the subsequent story of Irish radicalism, particularly that led by women, and its influence and enemies, through the 20th century and beyond.”

Valerie Flynn Criticism 4th November 2025

The anthology is like a cauldron bubbling with Lakshmi and lotus blossoms, whirling dervishes and speechless prayer, solstice spears and sepulchral floors. As Martin Shaw puts it, Moriarty is an ‘associative mythographer’ who writes as if speaking in a heightened delirium from the chaise longue.

Jade Bailey Brock Criticism 29th October 2025

‘Vaginov depicts a world where nothing means what it used to mean; not virginity, not Easter, not uniforms, not fathers, not marriage proposals nor playing the piano. Anybody who hasn’t realised this must be a bit mad.’

Philip Ó Ceallaigh Criticism 1st October 2025

If McNamee’s work is often described as somewhere between crime writing and literary fiction, it might be more accurate to say that he self-consciously employs crime tropes to draw attention to the way in which political violence in the north is narrativised. What could pass as classic noir fare is elevated to something else, a kind of anti-myth that interrogates its own dishonesty.

Conor Crummey Criticism 27th August 2025

‘If autobiographical writing is an attempt to fix a life inside language, frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry are both convincing arguments for the absolute impossibility of ever really succeeding in doing so. Instead, they offer an alternative: debris, glimpses, constellations, ghosts.’

Maija Makela Criticism 29th May 2025

‘Louis suggests that what may be hardest to live with about violence is not the initial shock when it occurs but how quickly it becomes natural as our bubbles re-form themselves around it. Change and L’effondrement, where the narrative and authorial voice are virtually one and the same, attempt to strike the difficult pose of neither ignoring nor accepting violence, allowing it to be at once ubiquitous and terrible.’

Rory O'Sullivan Criticism 24th April 2025

‘Alderman, Powers and Kushner all use fiction to think creatively about our contemporary moment, connecting ideas about past, present and future, human and non-human intelligence, in thoughtful and surprising ways.’

Niamh Cullen Criticism 19th March 2025

‘Season of the Swamp wavers between different ideas of itself, at times seeming a loving meditation on the character of a specific place, while at others it becomes a rollicking tale of rebels in exile, men of history in the interregnum before they arise to their destinies.’

Ian Maleney Criticism 19th February 2025

‘I suppose I’m taking the “joy” that I looked for in poetry last year to be something like little pockets of lightness or beginning. Not a turning away from the world as we know it (nor, as Rukeyser suggests, from the parts of the worlds we don’t know or understand), but a way to be in it. I found this kind of joy in several Irish poetry collections in 2024.’

Lily Ní Dhomhnaill Criticism 29th January 2025

‘Every plainly elegant passage here is charged by shadow narratives around the book, its project, its author and its “author”. No matter how outlandish the image or the detail, everything scans as a mise-en-abyme—an image of the book within the book. How’s this resignification achieved so absolutely? What is this thing that you’re reading?’

Kevin Breathnach Criticism 18th December 2024

‘In Old Romantics, the drudge becomes the show. Pain is distilled into humour and absurdity. Here is a writer who likes to amuse, indulge, titillate and engage, inviting us to follow the chaos right from the opening lines of the opening story.’

Sarah Gilmartin Criticism 15th November 2024

‘Discussions of autism often focus on our brains as the source of how we think, but our brains also govern our senses, and so thorough portraits of autistic characters are necessarily physical and sensual. In All The Little Bird Hearts, Sunday's first-person voice captures her embodied experience of the world.’

Jacqueline Russell Criticism 24th October 2024

‘We need more books like Pleasure Gardens for other regions around the world. It is an account that fundamentally magnifies the voices of the Kashmiri people, dignifies their portraits, and does the work of speaking truth to power.’

Ariel Saramandi Criticism 20th September 2024

‘Love the World or Get Killed Trying flouts the rules. It makes up words, like “marvelocity” and “thoughtfeelings”. It’s overwrought, repetitive, rash; it rises to heights of operatic intensity and delivers long, meandering anecdotes. All of this only adds to the charisma of the book and the rare urgency it is charged with.’

Ruby Eastwood Criticism 21st August 2024

‘The Coming Thing is a complex book… the heightened brevity of its compressed form hits the reader with the full blast of joy and angst that characterise Imelda’s life as we buzz through the pages high on mad panicked anxiety, vicariously sipping Dubonnet and slugging bottles of Stag and Benylin cough mixture.’

Clíona Ní Ríordáin Criticism 23rd July 2024

‘Klein’s book also tells us that fear is a trap; what we cannot push away, into a shadow self, we must integrate instead, learning uncomfortable truths about ourselves in the process. What if we stop seeing the doppelganger as the enemy, and start thinking of them as a part of ourselves, gone rogue after years of being neglected and ignored?’

Róisín Kiberd Criticism 13th June 2024

‘Sensationalised TV dramas may seem to have cornered the mainstream market for depictions of the Dublin underclass Karl Parkinson writes about. But Parkinson’s underrated story collection provides a different window into this world, with stories that portray nihilistic violence and addiction as universal themes, best grasped through visionary poetry and myth.’

Aiden O’Reilly Criticism 8th May 2024

'The four Irish books I have chosen from last year reminded me, in different ways, that what we say is always tied to where and when we say it.'

Lily Ní Dhomhnaill Criticism 11th April 2024

'In this respect, The Maniac is as much about the present as the past [...] Von Neumann’s delusions, filtered kaleidoscopically via the imagined reminiscences of those who knew him, prefigure the madcap fantasies of today’s transhumanists, accelerationists and techno-optimists.'

Luke Warde Criticism 19th March 2024

‘If Nomenclature, principally comprised of Brand’s previous collections, is fundamentally a recollection of things past, it is also a timely reiteration of the need for different futures.’

Inés García Criticism 16th January 2024

‘Their anti-Wild Women narrators yearn to return to society, to recover full citizenship there. They are aware that they had something once, and that they have lost it.’

Emily McBride Criticism 30th November 2023

New fiction explores existential longing with K-pop and cephalopods.

Róisín Kiberd Criticism 25th October 2023

‘With this strikingly intimate approach, we are invited into Sharpe’s project of sifting through the frustrations, the injustices, ‘the wake’ of Black life in order to better spend time with the beauty of Blackness, to explore the quiet of Black interiority that so often goes ignored or unremarked.’

Gustav Parker Hibbett Criticism 27th September 2023

‘The contemporary novel form appears, increasingly, to be the domain of slim, introspective works. The appearance of a sprawling novel like The Bee Sting seems significant.’

Stephen Cox Criticism 30th August 2023

‘How is it that while real wolf populations have receded, two-legged ‘wolves’ proliferate? What is the connection between these living, breathing creatures and the popular, metaphorical, and imaginary uses we give them?’

Mònica Tomàs White Criticism 27th July 2023

‘Greek Lessons is a puzzle... I’m unable to decide whether some truth about language has been excavated in the book—but also whether that was ever the point.’

Lisa McInerney Criticism 8th June 2023

‘Janet Malcolm wasn’t so much a critic as a journalist, an actual journalist—by which I mean, an investigative reporter—who rang people up or met them in person, composed and asked questions, took notes, owned one Dictaphone at least.’

Kevin Breathnach Criticism 5th April 2023

In this fine set of essays, Colm Tóibín's ebullience and intelligence is consistently apparent.

Adam Coleman Criticism 8th February 2023