69 Books Like Death Writes

I really enjoy stories told from multiple points of view. Everyone has a possible motive, and this kept me feeling uncertain who to trust.

The Guest List made me feel like I was in Ireland, experiencing the surface luxuries of a destination wedding while shivering from the eternal cold and bleak weather. It’s fun to feel like you’re there, like you're making new friends and living through the mayhem as the mystery unfolds.

It’s a crisp spring morning when Cass drops her husband, a respected lecturer, to the beach for his medically prescribed swim. While waiting for him, something catches her eye. A young woman runs towards her husband and embraces him – until he holds his hand over her face and she falls down on the stones, dead.

Kelly has created a stunning premise for her debut novel. Set on Dublin’s rocky Killiney beach, the book is about Cass’s solitary quest to unravel what has taken place.

The atmospheric setting of the waves lapping, the shingly stones crunching, and the moody sky continues through this edge-of-your-seat read about obsession and dark secrets coming to light.

Ideas of neglect and abandonment as well as isolation run throughout Where I End, a tense shocking literary debut from the Irish writer and journalist. This story is about an incapacitated mother being cared for by her teenage daughter.

I loved the desolation White created on the remote island inspired by Inis Meáin. With cliffs on one end, a sandy beach on the other, White describes how she was walking one day with her husband when she felt an explicable sense of dread.

“It wasn’t just wild and windswept and any of those clichés, it was actually more the stillness and the strangeness of it. And I noticed it was really getting to my husband as well, this kind of dread seeping up into us from the rocks and the sky and the ocean.”

This feeling is translated directly into the centre of the book, where the borders between landscape… show more.

Stranded on a dark road in the middle of the night, a young woman accepts a lift from a passing stranger.

It’s the nightmare scenario that every girl is warned about, and she knows the dangers all too well – but what other choice does she have? As they drive, she alternates between fear and relief – one moment thinking he is just a good man doing a good thing, the next convinced he’s a monster.

But a monster is exactly what she's looking for. When the driver drops her safely home Lucy’s heart sinks. She will have to try again tomorrow night. She’s made herself the bait, in her bid to find the man who took her sister.

Set in and around Dublin and the Dublin mountains, this gripping read from the author of The Nothing Man and 56 Days will keep you guessing until the very end. But… show more.

Set over three generations of the one family, this is the story of their fight for survival. What I love here is not just the prose, because there is no one finer than O’Callaghan, but also because it touches on the depopulation of Ireland’s small islands during the famine and the small island to which he refers has a very significant family connection for me. Partly based on O’Callaghan’s own family, Life Sentences tells an epic story of working-class life in Ireland from famine right through to modern-day. It is an unforgettable tale of love, abandonment, and reconciliation.

In 1899, the Irish novelist, Hannah Lynch wrote her memoir Autobiography of a Child. She caused controversy in Ireland and abroad by attempting to represent her childhood up to the age of twelve narrated through the child’s voice, a strategy I adopted but from the ageing child’s point of view where the language and thought process become more complex as I grow older. Her use of adult reflection upon the child’s unstable memory demonstrates an original understanding of the child’s point of view and its representation. Hannah uncovered the inescapable cycle of harsh treatment by her parents within a large family and the physical abuse by nuns at school. Her book reinforces the unreliability of memory for autobiography and helped me to accept that total veracity is not possible.

Townshend is a foremost British historian of his country’s rule in Ireland. He and the late Michael Hopkinson (whose books include Green Against Green about the Irish Civil War) are among British academics who have helped to educate the UK public on the impact of imperialism in Ireland.

Townshend astutely argues that the Catholic dimension of Irish republicanism has distinguished it from other forms.

This is loosely based on the 1915 sinking of the SMS Königsberg, in the Rufiji delta of East Africa. I love this not only for the fast-paced plotting, but for the characters, who are far less wooden and predictable than in some of Smith’s later work. The amoral and irascible Flynn O’ Flynn is impossible not to love, as is the utterly gormless hero, Sebastian Oldsmith—brave, loyal and handsome, if not actually the full quid. I like the sheer unpredictability of this one. Smith was not constrained by the formula he followed later in his career. It is by turns thrilling, funny, and shocking. I imagine his publishers eventually persuaded him not to write any more like this. He died with more than a hundred million pounds in the bank, so perhaps they were right. But for me, this outlier remains an absolute gem.

This is an unusual, ambitious, and relevant book, focusing on the Christian values contained within Irish political thought over a period of approximately three hundred years (from the late eighteenth century to approximately the year 2000). Many Irish politicians and patriots included a Christian element in their visions of and for an independent or a self-governed Ireland. Beginning with Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen of the 1790s, this Christian element is traced through Emmet, O’Connell, the Young Irelanders, the Fenians, the Home Rulers, and the leaders of the 1916 rising. The book goes on to trace the Christian vision through the periods of the Irish Revolution, independent Ireland, and the northern troubles of the late twentieth century. Engrossing and insightful, this excellent book provides much food for thought!

This is a story about three brothers. It starts with the funeral of one of them (you don’t know which) and goes back over their lives to unravel the mystery. They are all very different and none of them are likeable, and yet I found myself invested in all of them, trying my hardest to like them despite what they did – to each other and more widely. The book explores some serious issues around mental health and addiction, and I felt Nugent did this incredibly well – with both sympathy and clearly lots of research. The story is also told very skillfully. It uses multiple characters and jumps between timelines but reads very smoothly.