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The Best Irish Novels From the Past 15 Years
Which works by Sally Rooney, Colm Toibin, and Claire Keegan among others, reign supreme?
Published when she was 26, the novel follows Frances and Bobbi, two friends and ex-girlfriends at Dublin’s Trinity College, whose alternately prickly and affectionate conversations pinned something to the page that didn’t seem to exist in literature before: a remarkably alive-seeming specimen of a rising generation preternaturally acquainted with the language needed to discuss leftist politics and sexuality but just as incapable of articulating their own feelings as any 20-something has ever been. On a “rare hot Saturday” in a summer that is “already halfway through,” Mark, a Trinity student, finds himself torn between composing the second chapter of his Ph.D. (if he doesn’t submit a successful draft soon, he will lose funding) and returning to the family farm to cut and bale hay (an unspoken imperative for farmers’s sons since time immemorial). The first half of the book follows the four Madigan siblings, Hanna, Dan, Constance, and Emmet, from childhood into adulthood, across small-town Ireland, the gay scene in ’90s New York, impoverished Mali, and contemporary Dublin, before contracting again for a claustrophobic, dramatic Christmas under the roof and formidable gaze of the matriarch Rosaleen in Ardeevin, County Clare.
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