Irish Books
Irish Books
Each episode focuses on a single book to offer in-depth exploration of contemporary Irish writing, one of the the dominant presences in book shops, book groups, and writers’ festivals around the world. Guest experts on Irish culture join author and critic Chris Murray to explore the techniques, cultural resonances, and deeper meanings of the nation’s recent literature. Irish Books tackles prize wi…Social links:
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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 …
47:39
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…
35:40
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…
42:35
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…
39:23
Irish Books Season 1
Hear in-depth discussions of recent Irish books that are worth reading, across a range of genres. Expert guests get to the heart of books you know and give you ideas of what contemporary Irish literature to read next. In Irish Books, author and critic Chris Murray discusses recent Irish books with…
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