It’s not too late to dash down to the shops and buy a book for yourself or someone you love this Christmas.
Here are a few we’ve been enjoying:
- An Irish Atlantic Rainforest
There are not enough trees in Ireland. On that most will agree. If we want to stop catastrophic climate change, we need to reduce the amount of carbon in our atmosphere.
Planting trees is one way we can do that and author Eoghan Daltun has walked the walk on this.
In 2009, he decided to rewild 73 acres in west Cork and his book is a love letter to our environment and what it could be again.
BDE13E Many books on shelves inside secondhand bookshop in Prenzlauer Berg Berlin Germany- Exiles
In 1986, Dónall Mac Amhlaigh published a loosely autobiographical novel called Deoraithe about the lives of working-class Irish emigrants in London in the 1940s.
This was the era when ‘No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish’ still appeared in the windows of homes for rent and the Irish stuck together out of grim necessity.
The English translation came out in 2020 and while some of the intensity is lost as Béarla, it is still a moving portrait of a generation and a city that will pull at the heart strings.
ILLUSTRATION - 17 August 2020, Hessen, Frankfurt/Main: A pile of new books lies on a sales counter in a bookshop in the Bornheim district. Photo: Frank Rumpenhorst/dpa/Frank Rumpenhorstdpa- My Policeman
Published a decade ago, Bethan Roberts’ novel zoomed back into bookshops’ best sellers sections after it was adapted into a film starring Harry Styles.
The story of a closeted policeman, his lover and long-suffering wife in Brighton in the 1950s, Roberts deals deftly with issues of love, lust, secrecy and shame.
KFRGTH Book shelf in the Victoria and Albert museum - London, England- Between Two Hells: The Irish Civil War
In May 2023, it will be 100 years since the end of Ireland’s Civil War.
Lacking the glamour of the 1916 Rising, the consequence of the War of Independence or carnage of the Great War, the Civil War is comparatively understudied.
This book from one of Ireland’s most senior historians serves as a correction and provides a gloriously detailed account of how the new State switched from fighting the British, to fighting fellow Irishmen - with all the heart breaking consequences that came with that.
D5F6C8 old books on a book shelf- Beautiful World Where Are You
Sally Rooney’s characters are all grown up. They’ve left the hallowed halls of Trinity College, found jobs and realised that sending half your wage on a grotty Dublin flat is far from ideal.
Some things do remain the same. Rooney’s characters remain staunchly intelligent and dating is the all consuming obsession of their lives. Expect as well a lot of pithy dialogue and debates about how the world could be improved.
Typically, it is a beautifully well-written book about modern Ireland and what it means to be a young person in the early 21st century.
Thankfully, even though the book was published in 2021, it mercifully has only one chapter that mentions the pandemic. Surviving it was enough, as yet there really is no need to relive it through fiction.
