Books set in Ireland

About the literature of Ireland

Four writers from Ireland have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, from W. B. Yeats in 1923 to Seamus Heaney in 1995. Heaney's first collection was Death of a Naturalist, published in 1966. Far older is the Táin Bó Cúailnge, an early epic of a cattle raid, and Ireland also has a long tradition of Irish-language poetry and of the seanchaí, the traditional storyteller. The Catholic Church, emigration and the years after independence recur often in its fiction.

James Joyce's Dubliners gathers fifteen stories of Dublin's middle and lower classes in the early 1900s. In Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls, two convent-educated girls leave rural County Clare for Dublin. Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These has a coal merchant in 1985 New Ross confronting the local Magdalene laundry. Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn sends Eilis from 1950s Enniscorthy to New York.