March puts us in the mood for springtime and shamrocks. St. Patrick’s Day is a grand day where everyone is invited into Celtic parlors for a pint and wearing of the green. But Irish culture is much deeper than green beer and goes way beyond leprechauns. Ireland’s cultural heritage includes a legacy of rich literary history, from Oscar Wilde to Seamus Heaney and all the classics that lie between. Celebrating Irish authors doesn’t mean that you have to crack open one of the classics. Although staples of the world of writing in Ireland, authors such as James Joyce are not light reads by any means.

"Irish culture is much deeper than green beer and goes way beyond leprechauns. Ireland’s cultural heritage includes a legacy of rich literary history."

Contemporary Irish authors continue the literary tradition, winning prestigious awards and topping bestseller lists. Today’s Irish authors are making a big impression on the literary world, so in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, I’d like to celebrate with 12 books that have defined contemporary Irish literature.

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe

One night in December 1972, Jean McConville, a mother of 10, was abducted from her home in Belfast and never seen alive again. Her disappearance would haunt her orphaned children, the perpetrators of the brutal crime and a whole society in Northern Ireland for decades. Through the unsolved case of Jean McConville's abduction, Patrick Radden Keefe tells the larger story of the Troubles, investigating Dolours Price, the first woman to join the IRA, who bombed the Old Bailey; Gerry Adams, the politician who helped end the fighting but denied his IRA past; and Brendan Hughes, an IRA commander who broke their code of silence.

A gripping story forensically reported, Say Nothing explores the extremes people will go to for an ideal, and the way societies mend—or don't—after long and bloody conflict.

*Winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2019
*A Barack Obama Best Book of 2019
*Shortlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction 2019
*Time’s #1 Bestselling Nonfiction Book of 2019

The Witch Elm by Tana French

Toby is a happy-go-lucky charmer who’s dodged a scrape at work and is celebrating with friends when the night takes a turn that will change his life—he surprises two burglars who beat him and leave him for dead. Struggling to recover from his injuries, beginning to understand that he might never be the same man again, he takes refuge at his family’s ancestral home to care for his dying uncle Hugo. Then a skull is found in the trunk of an elm tree in the garden—and as detectives close in, Toby is forced to face the possibility that his past may not be what he has always believed.

“Tana French’s best and most intricately nuanced novel yet.” - The New York Times

*Named a New York Times Notable Book of 2018
*Best Book of 2018 by NPR

Academy Street by Mary Costello

Tess Lohan is the kind of woman that we meet and fail to notice every day. A single mother. A nurse. A quiet woman, who nonetheless feels things acutely—a woman with tumultuous emotions and few people to share them with. Academy Street is Mary Costello's luminous portrait of a whole life. It follows Tess from her girlhood in western Ireland through her relocation to America and her life there, concluding with a moving reencounter with her Irish family after 40 years of exile.

The novel has a hypnotic pull and a steadily mounting emotional force. It speaks of disappointments but also of great joy. It shows how the signal events of the last half century affect the course of a life lived in New York City.

"…has the feel of work that refused to be abandoned; of stories that were written for the sake of getting something important right...Her writing has the kind of urgency that the great problems demand." - The Guardian

Asking for It by Louise O'Neill

Emma O'Donovan is 18, beautiful and fearless. It's the beginning of summer in a quiet Irish town and tonight, she and her friends have dressed to impress. Everyone is at the party, and all eyes are on Emma. The next morning Emma's parents discover her collapsed on the doorstop of their home, unconscious. She is disheveled, bleeding and disoriented, looking as if she had been dumped there. To her distress, Emma can't remember what happened the night before. Her mind may be a blank as far as the events of the previous evening, but someone has posted photos of it on Facebook under a fake account, "Easy Emma." As the photos go viral and a criminal investigation is launched, the community is thrown into tumult. The media descends, neighbors choose sides and people from all over the world want to talk about her story.

Asking For It is a powerful story about the devastating effects of rape and public shaming, told through the awful experience of a young woman whose life is changed forever by an act of violence.

Bad Day in Blackrock by Kevin Power

On a late August night, a young man is kicked to death outside a Dublin nightclub and celebration turns to devastation. The reverberations of that event, its genesis and aftermath, are the subject of this extraordinary story, stripping away the veneer of a generation of Celtic cubs, whose social and sexual mores are chronicled and dissected in this tract for our times. The victim, Conor Harris, his killers—three of them are charged with manslaughter—and the trial judge share common childhoods and schooling in the privileged echelons of south Dublin suburbia. The intertwining of these lives leaves their afflicted families in moral free fall as public exposure merges with private anguish and imploded futures.

“This novel marks the debut of a deeply moral and probing writer—and a potentially great one.” - Sunday Post (Ireland)

Knights of the Borrowed Dark by Dave Rudden

Denizen Hardwick is an orphan, and his life is, well, normal. Sure, in storybooks orphans are rescued from drudgery when they discover they are a wizard or a warrior or a prophesized king. But this is real life. At least that’s what Denizen thought. On a particularly dark night, the gates of Crosscaper Orphanage open to a car that almost growls with power. The car and the man in it retrieve Denizen with the promise of introducing him to a long-lost aunt. But on the ride into the city, they are attacked. Denizen soon learns that monsters can grow out of the shadows. And there is an ancient order of knights who keep them at bay. Denizen has a unique connection to these knights, but everything they tell him feels like a half-truth. If Denizen joins the order, is he fulfilling his destiny, or turning his back on everything his family did to keep him alive?

Rudden's exceptional descriptive skills brings this story of light versus dark alive in a way that is rare to get right.

A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride

In scathing, furious unforgettable prose, McBride tells the story of a young girl’s devastating adolescence as she and her brother, who suffers from a brain tumor, struggle for a semblance of normalcy in the shadow of sexual abuse, denial and chaos at home. Plunging readers inside the psyche of a girl isolated by her own dangerously confusing sexuality, pervading guilt and unrelenting trauma, McBride’s writing carries echoes of Joyce, O’Brien and Woolf.

A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing is a revelatory work of fiction, a novel that instantly takes its place in the canon.

Last Ones Left Alive by Sarah Davis-Goff

Raised in isolation by her mother and Maeve on a small island off the coast of a post-apocalyptic Ireland, Orpen's life has revolved around training to fight a threat she's never seen. More and more she feels the call of the mainland, and the prospect of finding other survivors. But that is where danger lies, too, in the form of the flesh-eating menace known as the skrake. Then disaster strikes. Alone, pushing an unconscious Maeve in a wheelbarrow, Orpen decides her last hope is abandoning the safety of the island and journeying across the country to reach the legendary banshees, the rumored all-female fighting force that battles the skrake. But the skrake are not the only threat...

Last Ones Left Alive is a brilliantly original imagining of a young woman's journey to discover her true identity.

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that sends her own life careening sideways. Tillie, a 38-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenage daughter, determined not only to take care of her family but to prove her own worth. Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann’s powerful allegory comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city’s people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty and the “artistic crime of the century.”

A sweeping and radical social novel, Let the Great World Spin captures the spirit of America in a time of transition, extraordinary promise and in hindsight, heartbreaking innocence.

Solar Bones by Mike McCormack

Once a year, on All Souls' Day, it's said in Ireland that the dead may return. Solar Bones is the story of one such visit. Marcus Conway, a middle-aged engineer, turns up one afternoon at his kitchen table and considers the events that took him away and then brought him home again.

Funny and strange, McCormack's ambitious and other-worldly novel plays with form and defies convention. This profound work is by one of Ireland's most important contemporary novelists. A beautiful and haunting elegy, this story of order and chaos, love and loss captures how minor decisions ripple into waves and test our integrity every day.

*Winner of the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize
*Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year 2016

Spare and Found Parts by Sarah Maria Griffin

Nell Crane has never held a boy's hand. In a city devastated by an epidemic, where survivors are all missing parts—an arm, a leg, an eye—Nell has always been an outsider. Her father is the famed scientist who created the biomechanical limbs that everyone now uses. But she's the only one with her machinery on the inside: her heart. And as her community rebuilds, everyone is expected to contribute to the society's good...but how can Nell live up to her father's revolutionary ideas when she has none of her own? Then she finds a lost mannequin's hand while salvaging on the beach, and inspiration strikes. Can Nell build her own companion in a world that fears advanced technology? The deeper she sinks into this plan, the more she learns about her city—and her father, who is hiding secret experiments of his own.

Sarah Maria Griffin's haunting literary debut will entrance fans of Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking series, Paolo Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker and Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven.

Star of the Sea by Joseph O'Connor

In the bitter winter of 1847, leaving an Ireland torn by famine and injustice, the Star of the Sea sets sail for New York. On board are hundreds of refugees, some of them optimistic, many more of them desperate. Among them are a maid with a devastating secret, the bankrupt Lord Merridith accompanied by his wife and children—and a killer stalking the decks, hungry for the vengeance that will bring absolution. This journey will see many lives end, while others begin anew. Passionate loves are tenderly recalled, shirked responsibilities regretted too late and profound relationships shockingly revealed.

In this spellbinding tale of tragedy and mercy, love and healing, the farther the ship sails toward the Promised Land, the more her passengers seem moored to a past that will never let them go.

"Engrossing...will hold historical fiction fans rapt." - Publishers Weekly

For a peek at the rich and excellent modern Irish literary scene, borrow these titles on the Libby reading app anytime.