The Raptures is Jan Carson’s most autobiographical novel, dealing with a child raised in an evangelical Christian community in 1990s Northern Ireland – which mirrors her own background. In her book, a class of children from the same village fall prey to a mysterious and deadly epidemic. Only one pupil seems to be avoiding the effects of the disease: Hannah, a girl from a born-again Christian background. “There is a lot of me in this book and for that reason it was both very easy to write...

“I really don't like the fact that sometimes I'm referred to as kind of a controversial novelist because I don't feel that I am,” says John Boyne, whose novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas has sold 11 million copies and mounting, and has been reimagined as a film, play, ballet and opera. The sequel – All The Broken Places – imagines life after the Holocaust for some of the characters in the 2006 novel, which saw life in a concentration camp through the eyes of two small boys.  “I'm not...

Andrew Meehan is nailing his colours to the mast. He writes love stories, he says – although it took him until his third and most recent novel to recognise it. It was only as he was working on his latest novel, Instant Fires, that realisation dawned. “Halfway through I discovered, ‘Andrew, you write love stories. OK, it took you a while to cop on to the fact it’s what you do’.” Looking back, he understands that all three of his novels are love stories. “You write what you want to read,”...

One of history’s most famous royal love affairs is threaded through Emily Hourican’s latest novel. The backdrop to The Other Guinness Girl is the 1936 abdication crisis, when the newly-crowned King Edward VIII surrendered this throne to marry his twice-divorced American lover, Wallis Simpson. “What was it about her that so compelled the Prince of Wales? Why was he determined to give up everything for her?” asks Emily. The Other Guinness Girl: A Question of Honour by Emily Hourican is...

Happily ever afters don’t have to involve a fairy tale wedding followed by staying together for the sake of the children, come what may, says début author Cristín Leach. The art critic speaks candidly about her marriage breakdown in her memoir, Negative Space. A text message pinging onto her phone marked the beginning of the end for her relationship. Cristin also reflects on life and her relarionship to art and writing, and says: “I don’t feel that there’s any one reading for a work of art....

“Fiction sometimes unearths truths – and truths we’re not even aware of knowing,” says novelist Catherine Dunne. She’s talking about her novel, A Name For Himself, and Lia Mills’s novel Another Alice, reissued in new editions as part of the Arlen House Classic Literature. Both were published originally in the 1990s, but their themes of coercive control and an abused childhood remain relevant today. More info: http://arlenhouse.ie

As Somerville and Ross they were a dynamic literary partnership. When Ross died, Edith Somerville convinced herself they could continue to collaborate on books - by communicating beyond the grave through spiritualism. Martina Devlin talks about her novel Edith, set in 1921-22 against a backdrop of civil unrest leading to Irish independence. It follows Edith’s attempts to save both home – Drishane House – and literary career. She is interviewed by fellow novelist Nuala O'Connor. Edith: A...

Sara Baume is unafraid to use her own life in her writing, while insisting on its status as fiction. She does it again in her new book Seven Steeples, a gentle and thought-provoking novel spanning seven years. It’s about a couple and their two rescue dogs who drop off the radar and live a quiet life doing as little harm to the planet as possible. “Everything I write is always an extremity of my actual existence. It’s sort of like a smudged out version of us, I suppose,” says Sara, who moved...

If you think you’re obsessed with being online, you should meet the characters in début author Catherine Prasifka’s novel None of This Is Serious. Her book deals with the preoccupations of Gen Z, coming of age right now. Despite their shiny new lives, they fear a lifetime of being locked out of home ownership, and worry about whether the planet can survive. Above all, they think long periods interacting with social media platforms is time well-spent. “We’ve only had the internet for thirty...

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” said William Faulkner – and the past is ever-present, but with a twist, in Rosemary Jenkinson’s short story collection Marching Season. The Belfast playwright and short story writer tackles rioting, bonfires to mark the Twelfth of July, TED talks, and one-night-stands and threesomes in her no-holds-barred stories. Here, Rosemary also reflects on the numbing effect of cancel culture and discusses her own experience. Marching Season is published by...

Everyone is talking about Edel Coffey’s debut novel which deals with Forgotten Baby Syndrome, every exhausted-by-the-juggle parent’s nightmare. Breaking Point tells of a high-powered career woman who accidentally leaves her baby in the car on a boiling hot day – with tragic consequences. Amid the guilt and grief, she is put on trial for manslaughter. Inspired by a true story. For more on Breaking Point: https://vip7.hachette.co.uk/?s=breaking+point+edel+coffey

“Birds sing because they have to – because they must,” says the man who knows more than most about the subject, Professor David Rothenberg, an American musician, philosopher and writer whose books include Why Birds Sing, Nightingales in Berlin and Bug Music.  “Birdsong is the real classic music, this is oldest music we know. It’s been around so much longer than the human species – it’s stood the test of time,” he says. “It’s in their very nature to need to sing, just like humans need to...

“I had to create her out of nothing,” says JR Thorp of her debut novel Learwife, which explores the untold story of King Lear’s wife. The idea first occurred at the age of 11 when she read Agatha Christie’s The Moving Finger. “There’s a girl with a complicated relationship with her parents who says, ‘I wonder why Goneril and Regan were like that?'" She re-read the play and found only two brief references to Lear’s wife. Why this absence? More: https://canongate.co.uk/books/3650-learwi

Famously, King Oedipus killed his father and married his mother. That's what everyone knows about the Greek myth. But Carlo Gébler sets out to humanise the story. He talks about his novel I Antigone set in the seventh century BC, and why Antigone is his narrator: she had "skin in the game" as both daughter and sister to Oedipus. The story remains compelling thousands of years later because it is a family tragedy. More on Carlo Gébler's novel: https://www.newisland.ie/fiction/i-antigone

A chance meeting with a circus professor fired Sarah Webb’s imagination and led to her latest novel. She learned how Ireland had the world's 2nd circus in the late 1700s, with clowns, acrobats and bee charming: riding with a necklace of live bees. Her novel, The Little Bee Charmer of Henrietta Street (ages 8-12), resulted. It blends Dublin tenement life in 1911 with circus life.  Presenter+producer Martina Devlin More here: https://obrien.ie/the-little-bee-charmer-of-henrietta-street

Michael Collins is the the Irish Civil War's most famous casualty but there is a lot of “what-if-ery”about him, says Ireland’s best-known historian Diarmaid Ferriter. “Some “vey fanciful” claims are made about the kind of leader he would have become. And conspiracy theories about his shooting at Béal na Bláth in 1922 are “far-fetched”. Between Two Hells: The Irish Civil War by Diarmaid Ferriter. More: https://profilebooks.com/work/between-two-hells/ Presented+produced by Martina D

Playwright Rosaleen McDonagh talks about her activism, disability campaigning, journey through adult education which led to a Phd, and weaving together Traveller and settled culture, forging an identity from them. She tells her powerful story in an essay collection, Unsettled, dedicated to her family. And she speaks with pride about the current generation of articulate, engaged Travellers. Produced + presented by Martina Devlin More on Unsettled: https://skeinpress.com/product/unsettled/

A delicate, rare bloom which is “like the blood diamonds of the flower world” and fetches millions of euro is the subject of poet Paul Perry’s first solo novel. 'The Garden' centres on an orchid farm in Florida, where the owner is desperate to revive his fortunes by growing the highly-prized ghost orchid. But to find one of the orchids, he needs the help of the local Seminole tribe living on a nearby reservation. More about 'The Garden 'here: https://www.newisland.ie/fiction/the-garden

Violet Gibson, an Irishwoman who attempted to shoot Mussolini, is a character in Evelyn Conlon’s short story collection, Moving About The Place. In 1926, she fired on ‘Il Duce’ as he walked among the crowd in Rome. Her bullet skimmed his nose. Violet was sent to an asylum and never released. “Difficult women were locked up for all sorts of reasons,” says Evelyn. More here on Moving About The Place by Blackstaff: https://blackstaffpress.com/moving-about-the-place-9781780733104

From social change to gender change - all bases are covered in this wide-ranging conversation with one of Ireland's most sparkling writers. Lisa McInerney's The Glorious Heresies trilogy is a memorable take on a seamy slice of life. The latest and third novel is its riotous conclusion, The Rules of Revelation. More here on her novel: https://www.lisamcinerney.com

A new collection of essays which reflect on the perils and compulsions of authorship, the vagaries of success and failure - and what counts as either. Twenty-one contributors tell it like it really was. All of them came of age when equality legislation was being enacted in Ireland – often due to their activism. Look! It's A Woman Writer, edited by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, published by Arlen House More information here: http://arlenhouse.blogspot.com Produced and presented by Martina Devlin

At the age of 20, Nora Barnacle left everything she knew behind to share the adventure of a lifetime with James Joyce. She was a maid in a Dublin hotel when they met, he was a clever young man who wanted to be a writer. In 1904, they left Ireland, and Joyce immortalised Nora as Molly Bloom in Ulysses. Nuala O’Connor on the famous literary couple. Nora: A Love Story of Nora Barnacle and James Joyce by Nuala O’Connor is published by New Island: https://www.newisland.ie/fiction/nora

“One of the brilliant things about books is that you can buy a book by the very best writers and if it still costs a tenner – it doesn’t cost any more than bad writing,” says Rónán Hession. He's author of the 2021 One Dublin One Book choice 'Leonard and Hungry Paul'. It's a quirky, thoughtful novel which makes the case for kindness - and he says he's been on the receiving end of this quality throughout his life. More on the book: https://bluemoosebooks.com/books/leonard-and-hungry-paul

John Banville, who has killed off his own Benjamin Black pen name, is disturbed by explicit depictions of violence in popular culture. “If I were a young woman now I’d be out protesting about these things. It can’t be good for young men to be watching them," says the Booker Prize-winner. His latest novel Snow, from Faber & Faber, is set in an Irish Big House in the 50s and opens with a priest's corpse found in the library. More on Snow: https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571362677-snow.html