Crafting Better Selves Together: Elaine Feeney's How To Build A Boat

If the hero of this book is neurodivergent, Chris and guest Dr Frances Devlin-Glass agree that our author wants to avoid such diagnostic terms. They examine Feeney's novel as a bildungsroman - a story of development - about Jamie's first year at high school. Struggling socially, Jamie is marginalis…

Friends Reuniting over a Murder Mystery: Colin Walsh's Kala

Chris considers Kala with the help of YA author, creative writing academic and former fiction editor Dr Penni Russon. Walsh's novel has potent ingredients: homecoming, teen nostalgia, the dead girl trope, and a mystery to be solved. There are also supernatural elements. As such, Walsh spins many pl…

Letting it All Out: Orla Mackey's Mouthing

Each chapter of Mackey's innovative novel comprises a set of characters delivering monologues in which they confess, complain, and reminisce. Chris and guest Professor Paul Giles of Australian Catholic University consider how Mackey's characters recreate the patterns of earlier generations even whe…

Season 2 Trailer

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. Season 2 covers a range of contemporary novels and also branches into short stori…

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…