Journey to Eire

Happy St. Patrick's Day! Like any other holiday, March 17th can become gimmicky and commercialized, but there is a strong connection between American and Irish soil, as many of us trace our roots to the land of Eire. Enjoy your parades, your drinks, your music, and your craic today, but perhaps also make some time for a book that takes you into the land itself and the authentic words and experiences of its people. This reading list offers suggestions of novels (by Irish authors) set in Ireland, poetry, memoirs, and histories all about the Green Isle. Many Mainers feel a strong connection to Ireland, and you can learn more about the history of the Irish in Maine in They Change Their Sky: the Irish in Maine, edited by Michael C. Connolly. But whatever kind of literature and information you crave, from debut novels, to classics, to chart-topping nonfiction, we have many paths to Ireland at the library.

Fiction

The Island Child, Molly Aitken

Saltwater, Jessica Andrews

Snow, John Banville

A Line Made By Walking, Sara Baume

Pond, Claire-Louise Bennett

Minding Frankie, Maeve Binchy

A Week in Winter, Maeve Binchy

The Heart’s Invisible Furies, John Boyne

Milkman, Anna Burns

Buried in a Bog, Sheila Connolly

Tipperary, Frank Delaney

The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donoghue

Love, Roddy Doyle

The Green Road, Anne Enright

When All is Said, Anne Griffin

The Library at the Edge of the World, Felicity Hayes-McCoy

Dubliners, James Joyce

Himself, Jess Kidd

Eggshells, Caitriona Lally

Grace, Paul Lynch

The Long, Hot Summer, Kathleen MacMahon

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, Eimear McBride

The Art of Falling, Danielle McLaughlin

TransAtlantic, Colum McCann

Skippy Dies, Paul Murray

A Keeper, Graham Norton

The Little Red Chairs, Edna O’Brien

Murder in an Irish Village, Carlene O’Connor

This Must Be the Place, Maggie O’Farrell

Normal People, Sally Rooney

An Irish Country Village, Patrick Taylor

Nora Webster, Colm Tóibín

This is Happiness, Niall Williams

Poetry and Plays

Collected Shorter Plays, Samuel Beckett

The Lost Land: poems, Eavan Boland

Opened Ground: selected poems, 1966-1996, Seamus Heaney

The Weir, Conor McPherson

On Balance, Sinéad Morrissey

The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, W.B. Yeats

Memoir and Biography

Walking with Ghosts: a memoir, Gabriel Byrne

The Farmer’s Son: calving season on a family farm, John Connell

My Father Left Me Ireland: an American son’s search for home, Michael Brendan Dougherty

On Celtic tides: one man’s journey around Ireland by sea kayak, Chris Duff

Angela’s Ashes: a memoir, Frank McCourt

We Were Rich and We Didn’t Know It: a memoir of my Irish boyhood, Tom Phelan

Other Nonfiction

A Treasury of Irish Myth, Legend, and Folklore, ed. Claire Booss

They Change Their Sky: the Irish in Maine, ed. Michael C. Connolly

Say Nothing: a true story of murder and memory in Northern Ireland, Patrick Radden Keefe

Irish Travellers: tinkers no more, Alen MacWeeney

Malachy McCourt’s History of Ireland, Malachy McCourt

Voices of Ireland: classic writings of a rich and rare land, ed. Malachy McCourt

Stones of Aran: pilgrimage, Tim Robinson

The Aran Islands, J.M. Synge

Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: the fathers of Wilde, Yeats, and Joyce, Colm Tóibín