The Best Modern Irish Books to Read

Ben is the only son of a wealthy banker, and at the age of 27, he's been cut off. So, it's time for him to grow up. He struggles with a world of dead-end jobs and hard drugs, unable to find his true purpose. Then an old school friend returns to his life with a scheme: a shady property deal in the Balkans. 

The deal will make Ben rich and help him become clean, sober, and get one over his dad. It's all so easy, right? If only the Serbian gangsters following him around would go away.

La Joya de Andalucía is a brand new apartment complex in a picturesque Spanish seaside town that promises to make people's dreams come true. The residents’ lives intertwine and soon, the dream life reveals its darker sides. 

Anna and Austen MacDonald, an Irish couple, are preparing to enjoy their retirement, but family issues get in the way and reveal deep-seated problems with their previously sturdy marriage. American Sally-Ann Connolly Cooper is trying to get over her husband's infidelity. Eduardo Sanchez, a haughty native from Madrid, has set out with single-minded determination to become president of the complex’s management committee. And German Jutta Sauer Perez wants to start her life over in this town, but then unthinkable happens.

Frank McCourt became an unlikely star when, at the age of sixty-six, he published his now-famous memoir of his childhood, the best-selling and Pulitzer Prize winner Angela's Ashes. 

Teacher Man details his pre-writer career as a teacher in the public high schools around New York City. The struggles of teaching in underprivileged classrooms and unimpressed teenagers while finding time to pursue his writerly dreams weigh on McCourt. "Doggedness," he says, is "not as glamorous as ambition or talent or intellect or charm, but still the one thing that got me through the days and nights."

Kelly Johnson's husband has gone missing, sending the residents of the Foxrock suburb of Dublin she lives in frantic with theories. Then Kelly stumbles on a dead body in the graveyard behind her house. It seems like a tragic coincidence until Garda Sergeant Mike West finds a link between the dead body and Kelly's missing husband. 

And then to add to the problem, Kelly disappears. The investigation takes West to Cornwall and Cork on a trail of identity theft, drugs, and an inconvenient attraction to the missing woman at the center of this mystery.

The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan are gathering in Dublin for the wake of Liam, their wayward brother who filled his pockets with stones and walked into the sea. His sister, Veronica, collects the body and keeps the dead man company. 

Alone with the dead man, she talks to Liam about their dark family past and the secrets she’s kept concealed since her childhood. Veronica wonders if the root of Liam's struggles and alcoholism lie in his youth and what happened when he went to stay in his grandmother's house.

Gabriel Byrne is best known to audiences as a film and TV actor with multiple awards to his name and a slew of major box office smashes, from The Usual Suspects to Hereditary. 

Born to working class parents and the eldest of six children, he initially dreamed of becoming a priest and went to join a seminary in England when he was 11 years old. Four years later, he'd been expelled and returned home looking to find a new passion. His memoir, Walking with Ghosts, delves into his childhood and his journey towards the acting career that would make him world famous.

Ray is an outcast from society, left abandoned by the world to struggle on his own. Then a dog walks into his life, a fellow misfit with one eye who is in desperate need of a companion. One Eye is considered un-adoptable because he's got a mangled face and isn't good with strangers, but Ray sees him differently. Together, they find a much-needed friendship. 

As spring turns to summer, their relationship grows and intensifies, until a savage act forces them to abandon their old lives and take to the road.

Desperate to escape the Eastern front, Peter Faber, an ordinary German soldier, marries Katharina Spinell, a woman he has never met. A marriage will give him honeymoon leave and she'll get his pension should he die on the battlefield. 

Peter has ten days' leave to visit his mysterious new wife in Berlin. What neither of them expect is the attraction that develops between them and how much they hope to pursue their marriage beyond its convenience. When Peter returns to the front, it is only the dream of Katharina that sustains him as he approaches Stalingrad. 

Meanwhile, back in Berlin, Katharina, goaded on by her ambitious parents, works her way into the Nazi Party hierarchy for security for her family. But when the tide of war turns and Berlin falls, Peter and Katharina find their simple hopes crushed by history.

Novelist and short story writer Claire Keegan has won almost every major literary award in Ireland, including the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Walk the Blue Fields, published in 2007, is her second collection of short stories, all focused on life in modern-day Ireland. 

In the never-before-published story “The Long and Painful Death,” a writer awarded a stay to work in Heinrich Böll’s old cottage has her peace interrupted by an unwelcome intruder. The title story details a priest waiting at the altar to perform a marriage while battling his own memories of his romance with the bride.

Eoin Colfer is best known to many for his young adult series Artemis Fowl, but he's also got some dark crime novels to his name, such as 2013's Screwed. 

Daniel McEvoy is a down-on-his-luck Irish bouncer at a seedy New Jersey bar. He already managed to solve a string of strange murders, including that of the love of his life. But now, people around him are still dying and he must put on his detective hat once more and save the day.