There are so many brilliant books coming out this year, you can read about some of them here.
But we want to highlight some incredible Irish authors who will be releasing novels in the next 12 months.
Here are five we can’t wait to read…
Hungry: A Biography of My Body – Katriona O’Sullivan
Raised in a home marked by poverty, addiction and abuse, Katriona defied the odds: from teenage motherhood struggling with her own addictions to becoming a university professor and successful author. But beneath the achievements lay a more private struggle – with her body, her worth, and the unrelenting drive to be enough.
In this fiercely honest memoir, she interrogates how trauma, class and gender shape the way women see themselves – and how society teaches them to measure their value.
Told with stunning courage and vulnerability, Hungry is both a personal reckoning and a powerful reclaiming of body, voice and self. It is one woman’s story – and a rallying cry for every woman who has ever felt she had to shrink to survive.
Out April
Land – Maggie O’Farrell
On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomás and his reluctant son, Liam, are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland.
The year is 1865, and in a country not long since ravaged and emptied by the Great Hunger, the task is not an easy one. Tomás, however, is determined that his maps will be a record of the disaster. The British soldiers in charge are due to arrive any day, expecting the work to be completed, but Tomás is unexpectedly sent off course by an unsettling encounter in a copse.
His life, and those of his family, will never be the same again. Liam is terrified by the sudden change in his taciturn father. What was it that caused such cracks to open in Tomás and how is Liam, aged only ten, going to finish the mapping and get them both home? Land is a novel about separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonisation and rebellion. It is a story of buried treasure, overlapping lives, ancient woodland, persistent ghosts, a particularly loyal dog, and how, when it comes to both land and history, nothing ever goes away.
Out June
Our Deadly Summer – Emer McLysaght and Sarah Breen
They’re back! The co-authors of the What a Complete Aisling series have reunited for a brand new story.
Best friends Laura and Dee spend a wild summer waitressing at a Long Island country club in the early noughties, a season that ends with a dead body and a secret buried between them.
Twenty years later, an unexpected email forces them to confront what really happened that deadly summer, in a sharply funny, heartfelt novel about friendship, bad men and the past that never quite stays buried.
Out May
Anywhere but Here – Vicki Notaro
Three friends at life-changing crossroads . . .
Matilda is living the dream: presenting breakfast TV in Dublin and married to a man with a mega media career in the UK. But when she turns up in their London flat to surprise him for his birthday, it’s she who gets the surprise – a bad one.
Sadie is in the business she always loved – journalism – but it’s dying on its feet. Meanwhile her house is falling apart, her romantic life is just as ramshackle and nasty flashbacks to her past are becoming more than just a nuisance.
Jess is the one who was sorted early – married a lovely man, had two gorgeous babies. But with a distant husband and teenage twins who think she’s tragic, nothing she believed about herself makes sense any more.
Matilda, Sadie and Jess take off to Donegal to do some serious soul-searching. But maybe the answers to their problems lie closer to home?
Out July
The Mini Breakers – Lucy Kennedy
Five women. Twenty-two years of friendship. One annual holiday that promises escape, connection and chaos in equal measure.
No matter how hectic their careers, relationships or family lives become, they keep their tradition alive: one week away together EVERY year. This time, the Mini Breakers are heading to Portugal. But as the sun comes out, so do the secrets. Between complicated love lives and the messy realities of middle age, this getaway might just be their most dramatic yet.
Scandals, revelations and questionable decisions are guaranteed when this group of gloriously imperfect, perimenopausal and fun-loving friends reunite.
Out April