Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
Enjoy a day of celebrating Irish heritage and culture with exciting books! I am here again to make your start to St. Paddy’s Day better by listing the new and upcoming releases from Irish authors that you will want on your radar. Take a trip through the Emerald Isle through these insightful and creative writing.
Sláinte!
New Releases
- It Should Have Been You by Andrea Mara
- You’re Every Move by Sam Blake
- Nadia Islam, On the Record by Adiba Jaigirdar
- Esther Is Now Following You by Tanya Sweeney
- In Glass Houses by Edel Coffey
- The Lies Between Us by Jen Bray
- Grace by A.M. Shine
- Shorelines by Ruth Ennis
Gone For Good by Sarah Crossan
Connie Ryder is taken from her home in the dead of night and sent to Silver Lake Academy – a remote, high-security facility for ‘troubled’ teens. At Silver Lake, the vulnerable and the violent are locked in together under a brutal regime that aims to improve their behaviour. But when Connie learns she’s been given the bed of a missing girl named Belle, she is drawn deep into a chilling web of secrets and lies…
Her Hidden Fire by Cliodhna O’Sullivan
How far would you go to empower the one you love?
In a world where dragons soar through the skies and magical abilities are an elite privilege, the ruling family of Ailm’s Keep is on a knife-edge: Can their son Ionáin prove that he can channel magic, or will his entire family be cast out in disgrace?
Éadha, a servant girl who loves Ionáin, is shocked to discover shortly before the test that she can wield magic herself. It’s extremely rare for a girl to have this talent, especially outside the few great Families. At Ionáin’s moment of truth, when it’s clear he is about to fail, Éadha makes a desperate gamble to save him from humiliation by pretending her magic is his, forfeiting her own claim to power.
Her decision sends them both to an academy of magic, where she must shield her secret from every grim Master and scheming apprentice—especially the handsome but enigmatic Gry. As Éadha enters this whirlwind of patriarchy, class, heartache, and jealousy, she also learns about magic’s terrible cost—the human price that Channellers willingly pay to maintain their power. (Credit: Viking Books for Young Readers)
The Truth About Ruby Cooper by Liz Nugent
Expected US Publication Date: September 1
If my sister hadn’t been beautiful, none of it would have happened.’
Ruby Cooper and her sister, Erin, live an idyllic life in their close-knit church community in Boston. But when Ruby is sixteen, she is involved in an incident that causes her family’s world to implode.
Across decades, the fallout leaves a wake of destruction behind Ruby in Dublin and Erin in Boston.
Not that Ruby wants to think about the past.
But it can’t stay a secret forever. (Credit: Penguin Books)
The Woman in the Water by Henrietta McKervey
Expected US Publication Date: May 12
THEY WERE BEST FRIENDS. NOW THEY ARE MURDERER AND WITNESS.
At the heart of the classic novel Rebecca lies a mystery …
Pearl Day has always lived in the background – companion to her childhood friend, the dazzling and unpredictable Lady Eleanor Nicholson. Their bond was forged at Alderleigh, Eleanor’s crumbling country estate, but now they share a sleek London home where Eleanor’s life of indulgence is spiralling into chaos.
When Eleanor shoots her lover in a drunken rage, Pearl becomes the key witness in a scandalous murder trial. But she knows more than she’s revealed – and with Eleanor behind bars, she sees a chance to escape her quiet desperation. Their connection, once rooted in friendship, is now warped by grief, envy and power. And Eleanor’s reach is long.
Set between 1930s London and the windswept Cornwall coast, this taut, gothic thriller dares to answer one of literature’s abiding questions: in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, who is the woman in the water? (Credit: Hachette Books Ireland)
The Perfect Match by Adiba Jaigirdar
Expected US Publication Date: October 6
All is fair in love and rivalry…
Dina is done. She’s burn out after years in corporate London and now is working in her family’s struggling Bangladeshi restaurant. The last thing she expects is to be roped into coaching a football team of disadvantaged amateur players – or to say yes.
Maya is back. She could have had a brilliant career, but it all went…well wrong. Now she’s back home, back in her childhood bedroom. Her only escape is agreeing to coach her old secondary school’s team.
It doesn’t take long for them to bump into each other again and for as long as anyone can remember, Dina and Maya were rivals. But will the very game that tore them apart bring them back together? (Credit: Orion Publishing Co)
Upcoming Books
The Visit Neil Tully
Expected Publication Date: March 27
“The lad is a bit like a stray dog. I keep an eye on him and throw him a few scraps. There are plenty of people in this town who’d just as soon drop him off in the wilderness and hope there’s no scent to follow home. The problem is that Patrick could find his way out of any wilderness and they wouldn’t like whatever starved thing came back.”
Sergeant Jim Field feels a guilty paternalism for Patrick Hatten, a young man struggling to find a job, a life and a purpose in a small-town Wexford community. Both are used to being on the fringes but while Jim is a romantic with bad health and regret, Patrick is full of anger and action, and his actions could have devastating effects. (Credit: Bonnier Books)
The Keeper by Tana French
Expected Publication Date: March 31
On a cold night in the remote Irish village of Ardnakelty, a girl goes missing. Sweet, loving Rachel Holohan was about to be engaged to the son of the local big shot. Instead, she’s dead in the river.
In a close-knit small town, a death like this isn’t simple. It comes wrapped in generations-old grudges and power struggles, and it splits the townland in two. Retired Chicago detective Cal Hooper has friends here now, and he owes them loyalty, but his fiancée Lena wants nothing to do with Ardnakelty’s tangles. As the feud becomes more vicious, their settled peace starts to crack apart. And when they uncover a scheme that casts a new light on Rachel’s death and threatens the whole village, they find themselves in the firing line. (Credit: Viking)
The Counting Game by Sinéad Nolan
Expected Publication Date: April 7
Southwest Ireland, 1995: Two children go into the woods. Only one comes out.
When thirteen-year-old Saoirse Kellough goes missing, panic grips a rural Irish community. Saoirse is not the first girl to disappear in the forest, rumored by locals to be haunted, and the only witness—her troubled younger brother, Jack—refuses to speak. Saoirse went missing when they were playing the Counting Game, a ritual believed to ward off evil, and Jack has sworn to protect the forest’s secrets.
Freya Hemmings, a psychotherapist still healing from a loss of her own, is brought in to help investigators break Jack’s silence. As the race to find Saoirse alive accelerates, the search threatens to unravel a family facing the unthinkable. Everyone is a suspect, and the closer Freya and Jack become, the more danger they find themselves in. (Credit: Gallery/Scout Press)
Whatever Happened to Madeline Stone? by Louise O’Neill
Expected Publication Date: April 9
2002.
Twin sisters Madeline and Chelsea Stone are joint stars of the AtomicKids sitcom Double Trouble, but everyone knows it’s Maddie who shines most brightly. Until Chelsea beats her sister out for the role of a lifetime and is catapulted into the spotlight. And just as Chelsea’s star reaches impossible new heights, Maddie disappears.
2025.
Chelsea Stone retired from acting after her sister’s disappearance – but living life under the radar is easier said than done when you’re the most famous woman of your generation.
When a storage locker is found containing heart-breaking truths about the year Maddie went missing, Chelsea feels a flicker of hope for the first time in twenty years. This is her chance to discover what really happened to her twin, but to follow the trail she’ll have to face the past and step back into the spotlight . . . (Credit: Transworld Publishers Ltd)
Getting the Electric by Louise Hegarty
Expected Publication Date: April 30
Are you ready to play?
Have you ever found yourself doom-scrolling, worrying about that weird pain in your leg, only to have your plans for the day completely trashed by the appearance of a literal axe-wielding troll?
What about that time you came across a perfect double of yourself in the street?
Or the gorilla suit you put on one day only for it to fuse with your skin?
When those children went missing from your village, did you know for sure it was the electricity that took them?
And down in the basement of your ancestral family home, what is it that’s making that THUMP . . . THUMP . . . THUMP . . .
Bold, funny, and wild, Louise Hegarty’s debut collection will turn you upside down and inside out, if it doesn’t take you apart completely. (Credit: Pan Macmillan)
The Mini Breakers by Lucy Kennedy
Expected Publication Date: April 30
Five women.
Twenty-two years of friendship.
One annual holiday that promises escape, connection and chaos in equal measure.
No matter how hectic their careers, relationships or family lives become, they keep their tradition alive: one week away together EVERY year. This time, the Mini Breakers are heading to Portugal.
But as the sun comes out, so do the secrets.
Between complicated love lives and the messy realities of middle age, this getaway might just be their most dramatic yet.
Scandals, revelations and questionable decisions are guaranteed when this group of gloriously imperfect, perimenopausal and fun-loving friends reunite. (Credit: Bonnier Books)
Prestige Drama by Séamas O’Reilly
Expected Publication Date: May 5
In Derry, the locals are already in a twist about the arrival of Hollywood actress Monica Logue to research her role for a show about the Troubles–and then she goes missing. Everyone has a story to tell–about Monica’s possible whereabouts, and about the historic events that brought her here in the first place: the show’s screenwriter, desperate for this last shot at success; the grieving mother whose story he’s adapting; the ex-IRA member who knows the price of survival; the local psychic who’s seen too much …
Prestige Drama brings to life a chorus of characters as they locate themselves in Monica’s disappearance, and in the truth about their own history. From the author of the acclaimed memoir Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?, Prestige Drama is heartbreaking, hilarious, and profound, an indelible portrait of a community both obsessed with its past, and desperate to forget it. (Credit: Cardinal)
Love Scene by Anna Carey
Expected Publication Date: May 7
Writing for an iconic soap opera was supposed to be a dream come true. But Annie’s boss is a tyrant, the actors are out of control, and there are rumours that Northside will soon be cancelled.
The worst part of all of it: Annie has to share an office with her nemesis, Art Sullivan.
Talented-and-he-knows-it Art was once the Next Big Thing with a promising Hollywood career. So why is he back in town, writing for a show he’s never seen a single episode of?
Annie tries to ignore Art, who still knows exactly how to push her buttons – and is still distractingly hot. But when she suspects someone’s sabotaging Northside, she realises she’ll need Art’s help to stop them. If they can quit arguing long enough to work together, there might just be another plot twist ahead… (Credit: Hachette Books Ireland)
A Plot to Die For by Ardal O’Hanlon
Expected Publication Date: May 7
The first in a mystery series from the much-loved Irish actor, writer and comedian, for readers who enjoy the warmth of Graham Norton and the mystery of Death in Paradise, all wrapped up in one small Irish town.
When beloved celebrity gardener Finn O’Leary returns to his hometown of Abbeyford in Ireland to care for his aging mother, he is naturally roped into the Tidy Towns committee.
The Tidy Towns is a competition fanatically fought over by every town and village in the land. And for his best friend’s sister, Aoife, it’s a competition she’s determined to win. With everyone’s favourite gardener on board, she is sure that this year Abbeyford will take home the prize.
But Finn’s not been back long when an alto-baritone at his mother’s choir practice drops dead during a rendition of ‘What the World Needs Now’.
With more at stake than just winning Tidy Towns, Finn soon finds himself trying to solve a murder – or two. For one of his many qualities is that people tend to confide in him…
With his mother, her Nigerian carer and Aoife in tow, Finn sets out to discover just who has brought murder to Abbeyford.
And so it begins. (Credit: Simon & Schsuter)
Such A Nice Girl by Andrea Mara
Expected Publication Date: May 7
Everyone has secrets. Even your daughter…
The morning after a glamorous, luxury wedding, you and your best friend go to wake your twenty-four-year-old daughters. You open the door to their shared room in the pool-house and find a lamp smashed on the floor, a blood stain on the carpet, a ringing phone – and both girls are nowhere to be seen.
The police come and you discover something shocking. Something inexplicable. Is one of your daughters trying to kill the other? And that’s when you and your best friend begin to unravel what’s really going on between the girls.
You need to work together to find your daughters, testing your friendship to its limits. And you can’t help but wonder: which girl is the killer and which is the victim? (Credit: Transworld Publishers)
Frida Slattery As Herself by Ana Kinsella
Expected Publication Date: May 7
“Do you mind me asking—what kind of help do you need?”
‘You could probably run cities on the energy generated between directors like him and actresses like her’
When Frida Slattery and John Reddan meet in a Dublin pub in 2005, neither can imagine how they will come to shape and define each other’s lives.
Frida is struggling to launch her acting career, while John is already gaining a name for himself as a director. From the first they see in each other potential and the chance to create work that matters, though the lines between collaboration and exploitation, friendship and desire will prove dangerously slippery.
With the financial crisis looming, the next 16 years takes them from Dublin to London, via New York and LA, and through success and disappointment, joy and heartbreak. Their connection is tested and stretched to the point of rupture, but something remains that outlasts both their work and their own shifting perceptions.
FRIDA SLATTERY AS HERSELF is an unforgettable story of love, artistic collaboration, and two people coming of age, together and apart. (Credit: Simon & Schuster)
All Hail Chaos by Sarah Rees Brennan
Expected Publication Date: May 12
THE EMPEROR IS HERE. AND SHE MADE HIM WORSE. Rae is a fantasy reader who’s been transported to her favorite fictional world of swords and sorcery, castles and monsters. Playing the villainess, she thought she could change the narrative, but this version of the plot is far more deadly than the one she knew. Her friends are on the run: the Cobra shelters in an eerie manor haunted by dark secrets, while Emer and Lia stoke a revolution in the gutters. Undead armies roam the kingdom, raiders camp at the city gates, and the all-powerful Emperor–Rae’s favorite character ever, now possibly the greatest monster in the land–wants her to be his evil queen. Romantic in fiction, complicated in reality. What’s a villainess to do? Time for wicked bargains and fake engagements, in a fantasy where the most dangerous thing you can do is believe in someone. to do? Time for wicked bargains and fake engagements, in a fantasy where the most dangerous thing you can do is believe in someone. (Credit: Orbit)
The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan
Expected Publication Date: May 19
Set in the wake of Ireland’s devastating financial collapse following its Celtic Tiger boom, The Spinning Heart explores the fractured lives of a rural community left reeling by the sudden closure of a once-thriving construction firm. As the community grapples with vanishing jobs and crumbling livelihoods, tensions escalate, and a shocking act of violence ripples through the town, forcing each character to confront uncomfortable truths about themselves and each other.
Wry, vulnerable, and profoundly moving, The Spinning Heart is at its core a story about identity—how people present themselves to the world, and the inner truths they conceal. The narrative unfolds through a chorus of 21 distinct voices, capturing the language and spirit of rural Ireland with uncanny perception and articulating the thoughts and anxieties of a generation. (Credit: Pushkin Press)
Said The Dead by Doireann Ní Ghríofa
Expected Publication Date: May 21
In the city of Cork, a derelict Victorian mental hospital is being converted into modern apartments. One passerby has always flinched as she passes the place. Had she lived in another time, she too might have found herself held within those walls.
Now, she notices a sign: FOR SALE.
It is the first of many signs. Guided by an irresistible impulse, she follows them. Soon, she is trespassing, stealing, absconding from the routine of mother, spouse, daughter, as she uncovers a chorus of startling voices: those of the women who knew the hospital best. They murmur from archives and old records. They haunt from stairwells and walls. In them – and in one figure in particular — she may find meaning and solace, righteous anger, salvation even. Or her final vanishing?
A work of sublime intensity and tenderness, Said the Dead breaks the boundaries between worlds — past and present, imagined and real, fact and fiction — to make something new and lasting: an experience full of danger, full of love and full of truth. (Credit: Faber & Faber)
French Kisses by Jenny Ireland
Expected Publication Date: June 4
When her parents are told about her (totally unfair) suspension from school, wild-child Margot is forced to go to on a family holiday to the South of France.
Enter Félix and Antoine. They are polar opposites. Félix: mild mannered, caramel haired and sweet. Antoine: dark haired. Tattooed. Arrogant.
The only thing they seem to have in common is that they’re both ridiculously attractive, and they both have a thing for Margot. But there’s something much more significant about them that’s going to come as a real shock to Margot . . . (Credit: Penguin Random House Children’s UK)
Devotions by Lucy Caldwell
Expected Publication Date: June 30
In Devotions, “one of the finest short story writers at work today” (Wendy Erskine) explores yearning for distant pasts and unknown futures. A young Belfast theatre troupe brings their experimental production of Hamlet to New York. On a night-flight, travelling with a violin older than the United States, a professional musician slips through time. A man who loses all he thought he had, and finds himself haunted by all he never will, comes to a painful new understanding of what it might mean to love. Transporting and profound, these are stories of love, grief, longing. of new beginnings, and the ways we find shelter in each other. (Credit: Faber & Faber)
Buyer Beware by Catherine Ryan Howard
Expected Publication Date: July 28
If these walls could talk, they’d scream…
When Ellie moves to 1 Delaney Row, she hopes to find a fresh start—a place where no one knows her name, her history, or her secrets. But what she doesn’t know is that her new home is already hiding someone else’s secrets—and the people determined to keep them are watching her.
As Ellie starts to unravel the house’s disturbing backstory, coming closer to the shocking mystery at its center, she unwittingly puts herself on a deadly collision course not just with her new home’s history, but with her own as well.
A puzzle box of a thriller full of mind-boggling twists and turns, Buyer Beware is a chilling exploration of the dark secrets that any house can hold—and of the lengths we’ll go to start over. (Credit: Simon & Schuster)
Everything She Didn’t Say by Jane Casey
Expected Publication Date: July 16
Someone is dead. Somone is a killer. Someone is lying.
A woman is found in bloodstained clothes on the lonely coast of County Mayo.
At first, she won’t speak. Then a name comes: Ruth. And a story about her missing friend: Maura.
Ruth says she and Maura were staying in a clifftop house together. But there’s no trace of her there. Nothing but a pool of blood.
Ruth says the pair fought in the days before Maura disappeared. But the locals say they only ever saw one woman.
Ruth swears she’s telling the truth, but do the answers really lie in everything she didn’t say? (Credit: HarperCollins)
Few and Far Between by Jan Carson
Expected Publication Date: July 28
In 1958, a politician’s ludicrous proposal to create a seventh county for Northern Ireland by draining Lough Neagh—the largest lake in Ireland—was, quite understandably, never implemented. In Few and Far Between, Jan Carson imagines a timeline in which the scheme proceeded. When an archipelago emerges from the receding water, a utopian community establishes itself on the islands, hoping to escape the prejudices and dangers of Troubles-era Northern Ireland.
As children in the 1970s, Marion and Robert-John Connolly moved to “The Ark” with their mercurial father, a prominent anthropologist studying this unique community. When the novel opens in 2017, the siblings are among the final few inhabitants. Sheltered from modernity, they work as the Ark’s caretakers, monitoring the mysterious Far Side islands where ghostly figures linger and the land swallows secrets whole. A devastating algae outbreak is slowly destroying the landscape they love, but government plans to deal with the crisis by flooding the lough would force them back to the Mainland for the first time in fifty years. When a young anthropologist arrives for field research, the Connollys wonder if this ambitious academic might be the answer to all their problems. Can they keep the Ark from revealing too much of its past?
Written with dark humor and a distinctive Northern voice, Few and Far Between is a novel about family and memory, toxic masculinity and modern womanhood, and the legacy of trauma that offers an illuminating look into the history of a complex place. (Credit: Scribner)
Everything That Is Beautiful by Louise Nealon
Expected Publication Date: August 4
For Niamh Ryan, the Foleys are family. Her childhood flew by on their farm, playing with her best friend Peter and his sister Kate—while being doted on by their mother Helen and coached by their father Liam, a legendary former hurling player.
Now, following a distressing series of events, those ties are strained. Niamh receives drunken phone calls and messages from Peter who can’t understand what derailed their burgeoning relationship three years ago. Helen tries her best to escape her life by checking into guesthouses under the names of old classmates. And Kate, living in Belfast, works to maintain her job and a relationship while carrying the weight of the family’s secrets.
As a family wedding looms, Niamh, Helen, and Kate find themselves face to face once again—and the knotty love that has bound them might just bring them back together again.
Told through the perspectives of three very different women, Everything That Is Beautiful is an unforgettable story of love and family, heartbreak and hope—and who we might become after we pick up the pieces. (Credit: Harper)
Believe: In the Beginning, the World Was Wild . . . by Catherine Doyle and illustrated by Freya Hartas
Expected Publication Date: September 8
Young readers will discover the origins of magical creatures and mythical beasts in this lavishly illustrated book from bestselling duo Catherine Doyle and Freya Hartas
Step inside a book that takes you back to the very beginning; to a natural world where trolls, fairies, and dragons roamed, untouched by humankind. Here, learn the stories of these magical creatures from around the world, from cheeky trolls to shape-shifting fairies, fire-breathing dragons to singing sirens. Then turn overleaf for a comprehensive guide to each species. This lavishly illustrated collection includes 12 mythical species and their habitats, including:
-Trolls
-Fairies
-Dragons
-Merfolk
-Mythical horses
-Elves
-Goblins
-Gnomes
-Land beasts
-Mythical squids
-Yokai
-Sea monsters
Helped throughout by your fairy tour guide, Sage Brightwing, discover a magical world waiting just for you . . . if you only believe. (Credit: Magic Cat)
Stations by Louise Kennedy
Expected Publication Date: November 3
In 1980s Ireland, Róisín and Red bond as only two precocious and disaffected teenagers can. Soon he is privy to the secret source of her shame and anger: the father who’s abandoned her and her mother to their damp house and never-ending strife. But what does Róisín know about why Red avoids going home to his own posh parents and house—the house he soon flees forever?
When a Christmas visit to her father reveals the devastating truth of his new life in London, Róisín tracks down Red and moves into his Pimlico squat. But the path he is now on is a disturbing one, and gradually they drift apart. And yet the great, never-consummated passion of her youth remains a visitation upon the years that follow. Will Róisín ever stop longing for Red? Will she ever learn to let someone else love her—or learn to love herself?
Stations is a gorgeous, wrenching novel about the terrible—and sometimes redemptive—power with which the past hovers over the present. (Credit: Riverhead Books)
Sweet Pea by Kit De Waal
Expected Publication Date: November 3
When Paulette arrived on English shores as a young girl, she left behind a grandmother in St. Kitts who called her “Sweet Pea,” taught her to cook, and admonished her to avoid temptation and embrace love and forgiveness, in that order. Now Paulette is twenty-nine and in love with Denton, who she hopes to start a family and have lots of children with. But then Denton is killed in a car accident, and Paulette is left to grieve, as Denton’s friend Garfield finds his way into her bed. Soon their son is born, Bird, and Paulette decides to give Bird the best of everything, even as she lets Garfield go. Then, in a twist of fate, she meets the man who was behind the wheel of the car that killed Denton, and the grandson who he is having trouble caring for, a young boy the same age as Bird. Despite her grief and anger, Paulette takes the boy under her wing, and soon she is cooking him meals, making sure his clothes are clean, and letting him call her Sweet Pea. As the years go by, Paulette begins to understand the value of forgiveness, and most of all, love, and how much allowing it to guide her life has provided the strength she needed. (Credit: St. Martin’s Press)
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