Irish Books

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 when they venture far from their rural origins in Ballyrowan. Some show their true selves in their inner monologues, but others deceives themselves. A strength of Mackey's structure is that Mouthing is never simplistic about ideas such as spirituality, community, and family - and the book is often very funny.
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The Irish Books Podcast is supported by the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Monash University. Produced by East Coast Studio.
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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 stories and history. Episodes explore established names in fiction such as John Boyne and Jan Carson, but also Patrick Holloway's debut and a recent account of the Great Hunger.
Read along with Irish Books Season 2:
1 Orla Mackey, Mouthing
2 Colin Walsh, Kala
3 Elaine Feeney, How to Build a Boat
4 Padraic Scanlan, Rot
5 Jan Carson, Few and Far Between
6 Caoilinn Hughes, The Alternatives
7 John Boyne, Mutiny on the Bounty
8 Patrick Holloway, The Language of Remembering
9 Sara Baume, Seven Steeples
10 Brian Friel, Stories of Ireland
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The Irish Books Podcast is supported by the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Monash University. Produced by East Coast Studio.

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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 fellow-Irishman, the expedition leader John Conway, both in thrall to and resentful of his corporate employers. Through Conway, Fennell understands the complexities of the undersea network: the cables are imperilled by climate change, yet also strike the alienated Fennell as symbolic of human connections, from family bonds to larger questions of social cohesion prompted by racial tensions. As Chris and Killian discuss, McCann is drawn to both literal and representative meanings of the data cables and the task of mending them. While the novel draws on such literary influences as Samuel Beckett, Joseph Conrad, and Jules Verne, the enigmatic Conway is a Gatsby figure who mystifies our narrator.
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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 Maebh discuss, Barry gives us a more agentive figure than the folkloric models in Polly Gillespie, the more streetwise character. If this makes Polly more modern, and even feminist, than the old Irish stories, the novel also looks to our own time in its language: Barry puts twenty-first century speech in his characters' mouths rather than the language of 1891. The Heart in Winter is a deceptive novel: it has a straightforward plot but a rich texture, and an exploration of melancholic desire that is also playful in the tradition of Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, and Flann O’Brien.
Read the accompanying blog post at https://irishbookspodcast.blogspot.com/2026/06/dark-balladry-in-wild-west-kevin-barrys.html
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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 Sister befits the directionlessness of the IRA campaign in the late 1970s. Chris and guest Professor James Chandler (University of Chicago) navigate a book made complex by the narrator's reluctance to share: Middle Sister has been traumatised, and she reveals information in oblique ways. We piece together the story from the words of an evasive and digressive speaker who is mindful not only of direct recrimination from paramilitaries for any wrong decisions, but the danger of local gossip. If the scenario is terrifying, nonetheless Burns achieves a quirky humour in the unconventional storytelling mode and, in a subtle way, she poses probing questions about ideology. For various reasons, Milkman is a difficult book, on which many readers give up: Chris and Jim urge them to stick with it.

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