The beautiful jacket of Claire Keegan’s novel Small Things Like These is fashioned from Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s ‘Hunters in the Snow’. A significant detail is excluded from the selection.
Read MoreMolly Twomey’s collection ‘Raised Among Vultures’ is an impressively accomplished début.
Read MoreSome notes on the Macbeth chapter in Emma Smith’s book This is Shakespeare.
Read MoreRoy Foster’s overview of the life and career of Seamus Heaney is careful, balanced, and skilful, covering a lot of ground in a relatively short book.
Read MoreStephen Greenblatt’s analysis of 7 of Shakespeare’s plays which depict tyranny has become all the more dismayingly relevant since its first publication in 2018.
Read MoreClaire Keegan and Fintan O’Toole have written two superb books, which approach the same idea from utterly different angles.
Read MoreThoughts on reading, and on reading more, occasioned by Ian Leslie’s Ruffian Substack: Nine Ways to Read: ideas for reading more and better books.
Read MoreChildren’s Books Ireland have produced a handy and helpful selection of ‘100 great reads for ages 0-18’ to mark Pride Month 2022.
Read MoreAlex Quigley’s Closing the Writing Gap joins its predecessors on vocabulary and writing to form one of the very best resources around for teachers of all disciplines.
Read MoreZoe Enser’s Bringing Forth the Bard is a valuable guide for both novice and experienced teachers of Shakespeare.
Read MoreBernardine Evaristo’s autobiographical account traces her personal, sexual and creative journeys on the way to her recent artistic success and her ‘established and unswayable’ character.
Read MoreColm Bairéad’s superb version of Claire Keegan’s ‘Foster’ is beautifully done.
Read MoreNeil Sentance has written two marvellous short collections, imagining the lives of his family over many decades on the border of Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire.
Read MoreAshley Hickson-Lovence’s novel Your Show, an imagining of the career of the only black Premier League referee, Uriah Rennie, is a zippy and enjoyable read.
Read MoreA post with some notes for those teaching Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go (on the Leaving Certificate comparative list):
Read MoreVivian Gornick’s Unfinished Business includes a chapter on J.L. Carr’s beautiful short novel A Month in the Country, as she reconsiders it after reading Pat Barker’s Regeneration.
Read MoreSonia Thompson’s short ‘In Action’ book on Ron Berger’s An Ethic of Excellence is concise, practical and helpful for teachers and school leaders at any level.
Read MoreIn his late 70s, Bernard MacLaverty has given us a marvellous collection of short stories of the highest quality, in the ironically-titled Blank Pages.
Read MoreToni Morrison only published one short story, ‘Recitatif’. It is now published for the first time in book form, with a brilliant introductory essay by Zadie Smith.
Read MoreJames Harpur’s collection The Examined Life is a highly pleasurable sequence of poems recalling his time in an English boarding school in the 1970s.
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