Irish authors reading list

Reading lists

10 must-read books by Irish authors

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Read an extract from How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney

How to Build a Boat

** SHORTLISTED FOR BEST NOVEL OF THE YEAR, IRISH BOOK AWARDS 2023 ** 
** LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2023 ** 
 
Meet Jamie and his community on the west coast of Ireland in the most uplifting and tender book of the year 
 
'A gorgeous gift of a novel' 
Douglas Stuart, no.1 bestselling author of Shuggie Bain 
 
'Heart-rending and delightful' 
Louise Kennedy, no.1 bestselling author of Trespasses 
 
Jamie O'Neill loves the colour red. He also loves tall trees, patterns, rain that comes with wind, the curvature of many objects, books with dust jackets, cats, rivers and Edgar Allan Poe. At age 13 there are two things he especially wants in life: to build a Perpetual Motion Machine, and to connect with his mother Noelle, who died when he was born. In his mind these things are intimately linked. And at his new school, where all else is disorientating and overwhelming, he finds two people who might just be able to help him. 
 
How to Build a Boat is the story of how one boy and his mission transforms the lives of his teachers, Tess and Tadhg, and brings together a community. Written with tenderness and verve, it's about love, family and connection, the power of imagination, and how our greatest adventures never happen alone. 
 
'A heart-stopping read' - Sinéad Gleeson, author of Constellations 
 
'Bursting with soul' - Lisa McInerney, author of The Rules of Revelation 
 
'I can't wait for readers to fall in love' - Jan Carson, author of The Raptures

A heart-rending and delightful voyage... Elaine Feeney has a poet's way with words and uncanny understanding of human frailty

Elaine Feeney is an acclaimed novelist and poet from the West of Ireland. Her debut novel, As You Were, was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Irish Novel of the Year Award, and won the Kate O’Brien Award, the McKitterick Prize and the Dalkey Festival Emerging Writer Award. How to Build a Boat was also shortlisted for Irish Novel of the Year, longlisted for the Booker Prize, and was a New Yorker Best Book of the Year. With her third novel, Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way, Feeney was shortlisted again for Irish Novel of the Year and won the Library Association of Ireland Author of the Year. Feeney has published the poetry collections Where’s Katie?, The Radio Was Gospel, Rise and All the Good Things You Deserve, and lectures at the University of Galway.

Jamie O'Neill loves the colour red. He also loves tall trees, patterns, rain that comes with wind, the curvature of many objects, books with dust jackets, cats, rivers and Edgar Allan Poe. At age 13 there are two things he especially wants in life: to build a Perpetual Motion Machine, and to connect with his mother Noelle, who died when he was born. In his mind these things are intimately linked. And at his new school, where all else is disorientating and overwhelming, he finds two people who might just be able to help him. 
 
How to Build a Boat is the story of how one boy and his mission transforms the lives of his teachers, Tess and Tadhg, and brings together a community. Written with tenderness and verve, it's about love, family and connection, the power of imagination, and how our greatest adventures never happen alone.

All the Good Things You Deserve

How do we love, trust and create in the aftermath of trauma? How do we name and speak that love? 
 
In this powerful new collection from acclaimed poet and novelist Elaine Feeney, images and 
memory circle and recur, and the journey from pain towards a place of greater safety is far from linear. 
 
All the Good Things You Deserve juxtaposes violence, hurt and the tyranny of shame with love, beauty and the transformative possibilities of art.

Affecting&hellip; The caustic love poems&hellip;show Feeney at her best spill down the page with the energy of rushing tides

Elaine Feeney brings her poetry to Harvill Secker and Vintage with this powerful, personal, fierce collection about women's lives, bodies, battles and triumphs. 
 
From a searing meditation on the experience and aftershocks of a sexual assault - written as a series of unflinching cantos - to poems of love, place and new beginnings, Feeney's voice is strong and clear, challenging and confessional, rooted in her west coast of Ireland heritage while speaking to and with women everywhere.

As You Were

One of the most buzzed-about Irish debuts of 2020: a novel for our times

Comic, heartfelt and full of characters who walk off the page, it feels like Irish writing has been waiting a long time for a voice as unique and insistent as Elaine Feeney. A superb, unforgettable debut.

As You Were is an absolute tour de force: raw, sharp and wild. Elaine Feeney writes with such love for and understanding of her characters. It’s the literary equivalent of a stiff drink beside a warm fire: a book that will rattle you before it settles you.

As You Were was just (effing) amazing. Brimful of brilliant characters – what an exciting, visceral, poetic read. I adored the lack of sentimentality. Sinéad Hynes is complex and excellently realised – a role model too, for I found her (sometime) selfishness thrillingly refreshing. As You Were gives permission to Irish women to put themselves first, and considering what we've come from, that's seismic. Elaine Feeney is such a talent. I LOVED it!

A truly original voice. Raw, urgent and uncompromising about the lengths we go to to conceal hurt, deception, psychic pain... A brilliant portrayal of the kindness of strangers, the kinship of women and the heartbreak of married love.

As You Were is a powerful openhearted novel with an authentic visceral voice. It is a thrilling, hugely enjoyable read and a quite brilliant fiction debut from this superbly gifted poet.

Outraged, compassionate, and very very funny, Elaine Feeney is a ferociously good writer.

Elaine Feeney's voice is utterly singular, thrilling, unpredictable, a continuous pleasure. It seems trite in the face of such a captivating and original novel to say that we're lucky to have her - but we are.

Beautiful, torrential, vital, Elaine Feeney's debut novel aches with all the comedy and sorrow of how it feels to be alive now.

Rendered with searing honesty, biting humour, and most importantly of all perhaps, layers of compassion that creep up on you like a fragile child, Elaine Feeney's As You Were is a comet’s tail of loss, regret, hurt, damage, sass, wit, and courage; an artfully braided paean to resilience, to not giving up, to the small ways we find to bandage our broken selves. We should be grateful for this wonderful debut.

A beautifully manic soliloquy to life’s tickly pleasures and wacky distresses. What an absolute kick box of a novel. Just wow.

I was totally gripped: the writing thrums with originality. Fierce, astonishing, perceptive - I loved As You Were!'

[A] blistering flow of wild, full-on language and gritty life-story telling

Feeney's voice is at once fresh and sharp, with an eye for the comedy of existential dread

Extraordinary... This is writing that often reaches into your heart and clutches it

Inventive, entertaining and utterly original

A powerful novel... Fierce and insistent, its stories continue to burn brightly long after reading

Exhilarating... While As You Were may seem at first glance to be a novel about facing death, it is gloriously full of life

Discover this unforgettable, darkly funny novel about the power of friendship and the heartbreak of family life - shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2021. 
 
'AMAZING' Marian Keyes 
 'BEAUTIFUL' Douglas Stuart 
 'FABULOUS' Kevin Barry 
 'THRILLING' Nicole Flattery 
__________ 
 
Sinéad Hynes is a tough, driven, funny young property developer with a terrifying secret. 
 
 No-one knows it: not her fellow patients in a failing hospital, and certainly not her family. She has confided only in Google and a shiny magpie. 
 
But she can't go on like this, tirelessly trying to outstrip her past and in mortal fear of her future. Somehow, Sinéad needs to seize the moment, and maybe then she can learn to be free... 
__________ 
 
 An Evening Standard, Observer and Daily Telegraph Book of the Year 
 An Observer Best Debut 2020 
Winner of the Dalkey Book Festival Emerging Writer Award 
Winner of the McKitterick Prize 2020 
 Winner of the Kate O'Brien Award 2021 
 Shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year 2020 
 
'Extraordinary... This is writing that often reaches into your heart' Evening Standard 
 
'Exhilarating...gloriously full of life' Irish Independent 
 
'Feeney's voice is at once fresh and sharp, with an eye for comedy' Observer

Elaine Feeney

One of Ireland’s shining literary stars...an energetic and vivid voice'

Feeney’s astute lyricism makes for a marvellously engaging story

A haunting powerful page turner of a novel that will have you in its thrall from first to last page

Elaine Feeney is one of my favourite Irish writers. She's so good on class and rural living and the silent burdens that women endure... There is a section here... that's some of the best writing I have ever read

One of Irish literature's most gifted and persuasive storytellers.

An uncanny understanding of the workings of the human heart. I loved this book.

This book touched my soul ... A perfect depiction of the complicated relationships we have with ourselves and our histories.

Lulls the reader with its lyrical beauty, then slowly devastates with its raw passion and pain ... Shocking, intelligent and full of humanity, this is a story for our times.

A very strong novel and I was gripped by it throughout

Hugely powerful ...likely one of the most original you'll read this year

Expertly balances light and darkness, in a story that grips and engages... Sizzling, electric ... charged with humour and anger, reinvigorating and unexpected ...I loved it so

Superb... Feeney examines everything from intergenerational trauma and violence to tradwives, with insight, wit and compassion

The pull of home feels as irresistible as it is destabilising, forcing a confrontation with unspeakable truths... With a poet's eye, Feeney reflects on inherited trauma as well as today's 'trad wife' phenomenon

An ambitious, thoughtful, nicely layered book

One of the finest writers of her generation ... Feeney will break your heart with her characters but she will also lovingly put it back together again.

Feeney's warmth, compassion and bravery on the page... Her writing is so natural...that it seems at times miraculous.

This is a clear-eyed and deep-hearted calibration of accumulating trauma, which Feeney skillfully conveys the scope and heft of while considering what it might take to halt it in its devastating tracks. She has the novelist's instinct of wanting to get to the bottom of painful situations, yet she is also a first-class poet who knows that painful situations are often fathomless and ineffable. What we get then is a driven, tenacious, and probing narrative, made up of deeply expressive sentences that bristle and ache. Curious, sensitive, and unfeignedly visceral, Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way packs an intellectual and emotional punch as it asks that most difficult of questions – What now?

A true gift to Irish literature... Feeney's work has the power to articulate, with such great empathy, the truths of our country that were drowned in cultural silence

Elaine Feeney is a force to be reckoned with. Let Me Go Mad In My Own Way was one of the most talked-about books of 2025, and it deserves every bit of praise and then some... Let Me Go Mad In My Own Way is a masterpiece, and you're seriously missing out if you've not read it yet

Feeney has created a brilliant metaphor in the O’Connor family home… It’s a hugely satisfying, sophisticated structure

A strong story that packs an emotional punch ... In presenting both a political and personal history, Feeney delivers a moving meditation on enforced female roles in Irish society both past and present, the heavy pall of grief and the unceasing encroachment of the past into the present

This book sucked me in completely... Feeney’s writing is lyrical, real, and powerful... I will be dipping into this book again and again

Astonishing ... A book about how women hold power and space and how the truths passed down by women from generation to generation create a shadow history that stands as a corrective to received narratives.

An emotionally layered novel about memory, grief and resilience

I absolutely loved this novel - a story of lost love and longing that tears open to reveal a whole history of violence, told with the effortless intelligence and extraordinary compassion.

A beautiful digressive trip through modern life, and a far-wider-reaching, wildly ambitious vision of what it means to be Irish and a person right now.

A startling and original novel loaded with insight on the long reach of traumas both personal and political.

Conveyed with lyricism and longing.

Beautifully written ... Devastating, true and timely

Economist, *The Best Books of the Year So far*

THE INSTANT IRISH TIMES BESTSELLER 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE IRISH BOOK AWARDS NOVEL OF THE YEAR 
WINNER OF AUTHOR OF THE YEAR AT THE IRISH BOOK AWARDS 
 
Claire O’Connor’s life has been on hold since she broke up with Tom Morton and moved back home to the rugged West of Ireland to care for her dying father. She spends her days getting lost online, going to work and minding her own business. 
 
But Claire is thrown back into a love she thought she’d left behind when Tom unexpectedly moves nearby, stirring up haunting memories trapped within the walls of the old family house. As the secrets of the past are revealed, Claire must confront whether she can escape her history to make a future for herself.

Elaine Feeney

Praise for Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way

One of Ireland’s shining literary stars...an energetic and vivid voice'

Feeney’s astute lyricism makes for a marvellously engaging story

A haunting powerful page turner of a novel that will have you in its thrall from first to last page

One of Ireland’s shining literary stars...an energetic and vivid voice'

Feeney’s astute lyricism makes for a marvellously engaging story

A haunting powerful page turner of a novel that will have you in its thrall from first to last page

One of Ireland’s shining literary stars...an energetic and vivid voice'

Feeney’s astute lyricism makes for a marvellously engaging story

A haunting powerful page turner of a novel that will have you in its thrall from first to last page

Books by Elaine Feeney

Articles featuring Elaine Feeney

10 must-read books by Irish authors

Read an extract from How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney

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