Connections Severed and Retied: Colum McCann's Twist

Killian Quigley, an expert in oceanic humanities, is Chris's guest to discuss McCann's deep-sea adventure. Writer Anthony Fennell joins a vessel that repairs the information cables that run deep under the ocean, hoping for material for an article. Yet Fennell finds himself especially drawn to his f…

Tragic Balladry in the Wild West: Kevin Barry's The Heart in Winter

Maebh Long - Kevin Barry fan and Eamon Cleary Chair of Irish Studies at the University of Otago - joins Chris to discuss The Heart in Winter. Barry's tale of lovers on the run is set in the American midwest in 1891 but looks back to Irish folkloric figures like Deirdre of the Sorrows. As Chris and …

Is the Sky Blue? Anna Burns's Milkman

This remarkable novel presents us with a speaker who is reluctant to tell her story. Our young narrator's crisis begins when a republican paramilitary known as the Milkman begins to pay her unwanted attention. Milkman's courtship resembles guerrilla warfare, and his unexplained attraction to Middle…

Cracked Lens over a Cold Case: Sebastian Barry's Old God's Time

Kevin Foster, an expert in war narratives at Monash University, helps Chris examine a quirky veteran: the hero of Old God's Time fought in the Malayan Emergency and is a retired Garda. He was also brought up in a Christian Brothers home: protagonist Tom Kettle has been through the wars, so to speak…

Placing the Pieces of Grief and Love: Sally Rooney's Intermezzo

Chris's guest to discuss Intermezzo is Madeleine Callaghan (Maddy), Senior Lecturer in the School of English at the University of Sheffield. Maddy explains that Rooney's title alludes to the opening strategies of chess, in which players aim to set up the conditions they want for free play. But Roon…

Excavating the Hidden Self: Adrian Duncan's The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth

Lucy Collins of University College Dublin explains that Duncan refuses what we expect of a novel. The ideas of visual art matter more here than the plot and character that usually drive fiction. Our focus is on the restorative sculptor John Molloy, and the narrative takes us into his craft. While C…

Back from Brooklyn: Colm Tóibín's Long Island

25 years after the events of Brooklyn, Eilis Lacey has integrated to American life successfully, but faces a crisis in consequence of her husband's infidelity, a crisis that propels her home to Enniscorthy. Guest Matthew Ryan, a specialist in Modern Literature at the Australian Catholic University …

Grime, Passion, and Addiction: Eimear McBride's The City Changes its Face

Dr Frances Devlin-Glass, Director of the annual James Joyce celebration Bloomsday Melbourne,  sees Joyce's Modernism at work in McBride's novel. Chris and Frances find McBride having fun with language, the written sentence, and even typesetting at the same time as she explores the complex relations…

Losing All Life's Certainties: Paul Lynch's Prophet Song

Lynch’s Booker-winner is divisive. While Chris Murray wonders whether the characters in Prophet Song could be fleshed out, and the story of a fascist Ireland more fully realised, his guest says that this misses the point. Professor Christopher Morash (Trinity College Dublin) argues that Lynch’s pur…

Disaster on Rails: Emma Donoghue’s Paris Express

In this episode of Irish Books, historian Professor Dianne Hall joins Chris Murray to discuss Emma Donoghue’s The Paris Express, a book that brings aspects of the thriller genre to literary fiction. Set aboard a train on a single day in 1895, The Paris Express assembles a cast of real figures, but…