Colm Tóibín's Favorite Irish Novels

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Colm Tóibín knows a thing or two about Irish novels; he's written 11 of them himself, including, most recently, Oprah's 105th Book Club pick, Long Island. (Don't let the title fool you—most of the book takes place in the east Irish village of Enniscorthy—the same town where Tóibín grew up!) But Tóibín is not just a prolific Irish writer; he's also a prolific reader of literature from his home country. Read on for his favorite recommendations, from old classics to new gems.

Wild Houses, by Colin Barrett

Three Irish novelists, in the past few years, have written books set in County Mayo in the west of Ireland. Because each of them—Colin Barrett, Sally Rooney, and Mike McCormack—has a different vision and a distinct prose style and ways of structuring a story, we get not only County Mayo in many varieties but varying ideas of character and story. Barrett’s first novel, Wild Houses, comes after two remarkable collections of stories—Young Skins and Homesickness—in which he developed a style that was both muscular and lyrical to describe contemporary life in a small town in Ireland. His dialogue in those books is close to perfect. It is both edgy and poetic, as are his chiseled sentences and his way of creating memorable characters.

Ordinary Human Failings, by Megan Nolan

Megan Nolan’s second novel shows the same set of characters in two different countries and two different contexts. In England, the Greens seem like a classic problem family. And the writing at the beginning suggests that this is going to be a contemporary thriller or a crime novel. But slowly it becomes a tender dramatization of the life of a young Irish woman—Carmel Green—whose intelligence is not matched by the chances she gets. When we see the Green family in Ireland, we get a closer sense of how easily things might have been different. At the center of the book is Carmel’s inner life and the study of the choices she makes. Nolan is a skillful explorer of human frailty and ambiguity. Carmel is one of the most interesting and complex heroines in modern Irish writing.

Soldier Sailor, by Claire Kilroy

A searing and fascinating new novel about motherhood, Soldier Sailor dramatizes the ordinary days and nights in the early life of a child, told from the point of view of a loving mother, a woman whose waking time is devoted to caring, nurturing, and feeding the baby, changing nappies and soothing its every cry. The husband, in the meantime, manages to be both present and absent. As the breadwinner, so to speak, he gets to leave the house every day. He can insist that he needs his sleep while his wife desperately tries to calm their infant. With its honesty, evocative detail, and larger questions about sexism and society, this book is likely to become a classic of its kind, regardless of the country.

The Pages, by Hugo Hamilton

The hero of Hugo Hamilton’s perfect gem of novel is a book, an actual printed book—Joseph Roth’s novel Rebellion—that was saved from a fire lit by the Nazis in Berlin in 1933. The book can talk as much as it can hear and see. It doesn’t just have pages; it has a soul. It loves life and hates suffering. But more than anything, the book (and the novelist) knows how to tell a story that is witty and engaging. It also loves travel and adventure—it gets taken to America and then goes back to Europe. It knows more than we do: “I have accumulated,” the book tells us, “the inner lives of my readers. Their thoughts have been added in layers underneath the text, turning me into a living thing, with human faculties. I have the ability to remember. I can tell when history is in danger of repeating itself.”

Hereafter, by Vona Groarke

Vona Groarke, a distinguished and talented Irish poet, has written the story of her great-grandmother Ellen O’Hara, who emigrated from Ireland to New York in the 1880s. Ellen worked first as a maid and then ran her own boarding house. Because she left no diaries or letters, and because official information in archives about her and her Irish husband is scant, Groarke imagines aspects of Ellen’s life. She also does ingenious research on how Ellen lived and what happened to her family. And since Groarke is a poet, she composes poems exploring a time spent in the shadows that now comes vividly to life in this great modern book on the immigrant experience.

Ulysses, by James Joyce

At Columbia University each year, I teach James Joyce’s Ulysses. In a small seminar room, we spend the whole semester with the book. And each year, I come to further appreciate Joyce’s masterpiece. The more I know it, the more fascinating and engrossing it becomes. I love Joyce’s sense of pattern and structure. I relish his fascination with style and language, his playfulness. I love also Joyce’s sense of Dublin on a summer’s day in 1904, the bars, the chance encounters, the street life. Leopold Bloom, the main protagonist, is sensuous, intelligent, imaginative, tolerant, and a born noticer. When his wife, Molly, gets the last word, it is a long soliloquy delivered with relish, gusto, and a kind of fearlessness.

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