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From compelling romances, to all-consuming infatuation and heartbreak, there are no shortage of Irish novels exploring the multi-faceted nature of relationships. With power dynamics, communication, gender, and class differences explored in-depth across this selection of brilliant works, this is the ultimate romance and relationships ready list of books written by An Post Irish Book Awards alumni.
One of the world’s most well-known contemporary authors, Sally Rooney’s nuanced observations of modern, romantic relationships and friendships have changed the literary landscape of today. In her second novel, Normal People, Rooney charts the devastatingly complicated relationship between Marianne and Connell, and the ways in which they come together and apart, struggling to communicate their true feelings.
Marianne is the young, affluent, intellectual wallflower; Connell is the boy everyone likes, shadowed by his family’s reputation and poverty. Unlikely friends, and later lovers, their small town beginnings in rural Ireland are swiftly eclipsed by the heady worlds of student Dublin. Gradually their intense, mismatched love becomes a battleground of power, class, and the falsehoods they choose to believe.
Normal People is a tale of deceptive simplicity, a very accessible narrative of two seemingly mismatched young people who share a profound, inescapable understanding. Beyond that however is something properly universal, a study of how one person can forever shape and impact another. Marianne and Connell emerge almost shockingly real and deeply vulnerable in their different ways.
Louise Kennedy’s debut of love amid The Troubles is a raw and intensely realised depiction of everyday life lived in conflict. Capturing with realism and detail the way violence can become part of everyday existence, this is a haunting tale of a divided community and city, and the tragedies such strife provokes.
There is nothing special about the day Cushla meets Michael, a married man from Belfast, in the pub owned by her family. But here, love is never far from violence, and this encounter will change both of their lives forever. As people get up each morning and go to work, school, church or the pub, the daily news rolls in of another car bomb exploded, another man beaten, killed or left for dead.
In the class Cushla teaches, the vocabulary of seven-year-old children now includes phrases like 'petrol bomb' and 'rubber bullets'. And as she is forced to tread lines she never thought she would cross, tensions in the town are escalating, threatening to destroy all she is working to hold together.
Tender and shocking, Trespasses is an unforgettable debut of people trying to live ordinary lives in extraordinary times.
In this tender and heart-wrenching narrative of love and loss, the acclaimed Colm Tóibín charts the journey of one woman as she emigrates to New York for a better future, and the choices she eventually has to make between duty and freedom, past and present.
It is Ireland in the early 1950s and for Eilis Lacey, as for so many young Irish girls, opportunities are scarce. So when her sister arranges for her to emigrate to New York, Eilis knows she must go, leaving behind her family and her home for the first time.
Arriving in a crowded lodging house in Brooklyn, Eilis can only be reminded of what she has sacrificed. She is far from home - and homesick. And just as she takes tentative steps towards friendship, and perhaps something more, Eilis receives news which sends her back to Ireland. There she will be confronted by a terrible dilemma - a devastating choice between duty and one great love.
The debut that took the world by storm, Naoise Dolan’s wit and observations of human behaviour are sensationally sharp in Exciting Times. Exploring the emotional transaction and power play in relationships, Dolan follows Ava as she struggles with self-realisation and self-worth in her relationship with the wealthy Julian. But when she meets Edith, Ava experiences the fear and vulnerability that comes with real love and connection.
When you leave Ireland aged 22 to spend your parents' money, it's called a gap year. When Ava leaves Ireland aged 22 to make her own money, she's not sure what to call it, but it involves:
Exciting times ensue.
The Forgotten Waltz centres on an extramarital affair with an older man, and the repercussions that follow. Exploring infatuation, betrayal, shame, and family, Enright’s storytelling and prose abilities are unparalleled.
If it hadn't been for the child then none of this might have happened.
She saw me kissing her father.
She saw her father kissing me.
The fact that a child got mixed up in it all made us feel that it mattered, that there was no going back.
A compulsive and compelling novel from the talented Louise O’Neill, Almost Love is a striking and honest depiction of obsessive love. Taking a sharp look at self-destruction and infatuation, this a book about the ill-fated kinds of love: compulsive, unequal and unrequited.
When Sarah falls for Matthew, she falls hard.
So it doesn't matter that he's twenty years older. That he sees her only in secret. That, slowly but surely, she's sacrificing everything else in her life to be with him.
Sarah's friends are worried. Her father can't understand how she could allow herself to be used like this. And she's on the verge of losing her job.
But Sarah can't help it. She is addicted to being desired by Matthew.
And love is supposed to hurt.
Isn't it?
A dialogue-rich novel that traverses the pubs of Dublin as two old friends revisit their lives and loves over many pints, much rambling, and even more fumbling to find the right words. Roddy Doyle’s Love is a deft look at love in all of its forms, and an exploration of masculinity and bonding.
One summer's evening, two men meet up in a Dublin restaurant.
Old friends, now married and with grown-up children, their lives have taken seemingly similar paths. But Joe has a secret he has to tell Davy, and Davy, a grief he wants to keep from Joe. Both are not the men they used to be.
Neither Davy nor Joe know what the night has in store, but as two pints turns to three, then five, and the men set out to revisit the haunts of their youth, the ghosts of Dublin entwine around them. Their first buoyant forays into adulthood, the pubs, the parties, broken hearts and bungled affairs, as well as the memories of what eventually drove them apart.
As the two friends try to reconcile their versions of the past over the course of one night, Love offers up a delightfully comic, yet moving portrait of the many forms love can take throughout our lives.
This year's shortlists are announced on the 19th of October.