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
Angela’s Ashes: a memoir, Frank McCourt
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