100 Books Like The End of the Hunt

I picked this because it showed me – and still does – that the most foreign journey is within, and that when the body stops travelling, the spirit takes over the trek.

Brennan is a fabulous writer – at her best, among the best – and in her head (she wore a beehive that according to a colleague at The New Yorker was taller than she was) she is travelling all the time.

She ought to be better known. 

Set in the period 1914-1916, it follows the life of Kate Crilly, a young girl whose brother Liam has just been killed in the Great War. This loss binds Kate to Liam’s comrade in arms, Hubie Wilson. Meanwhile, the tensions of the Rising are at boiling point and Dublin is turning into a battleground as Kate doubles back and across the River Liffey checking on her family, her friends and her desperately ill sister. Mills excels at describing the nature of grief and how one lives with it, rather than dwelling on the immediate impact of the loss per se. Beautiful, limpid prose and imagery, really enjoyed.

Christmas brings memories of other Christmases and can, therefore, be as much a melancholy time as a wonderful one.

The last story in James Joyce’s Dubliners ends with this burden of memory, and within a marriage, strikes a note of separation at the time of festivity. Before then, he brings to life for us Christmas parties, Edwardian Dublin in late December, conviviality, and the pain and delight of music.

It’s as good a story as anyone ever wrote and as Christmassy in its sadness as Dickens is in its joy.

I laughed out loud a bunch, and I don’t do that very often (I ought to.) I also learned a lot about lower-class Dublin life. I cared about McDonnell’s characters even as they become tangled up in absurd situations as they try to solve several crimes.

I know how hard it is to mix truly funny humor and a suspenseful plot. This author is a maestro. Perhaps it’s because he’s a well-known comedian in Ireland. McDonnell also has a keen ear for dialogue, which always sounds real and true to his characters—a very colorful array of quirky police, truant children, and creepy villains.

This Stella prize-winning novel is so mysterious, the ominous atmosphere shudders off the page.

It’s a modern-day parable about ten women who are abducted and held prisoner in the Australian desert. Gradually they realised the common thread between them is they’ve all been involved in a sex scandal with a powerful man.

Wood ingeniously takes to the patriarchy with a blow torch. It’s breathtakingly powerful. Reading the final line, I shut my eyes and my heart hurt. In a good way. 

"Would it be said they were abandoned or taken, the way people said a girl was attacked, a woman was raped, this femaleness always at the centre, as if womanhood itself were the cause of these things? As if the girls somehow, through the natural way of things, did it to themselves."

This book has so much I love about it: it’s set in Dublin, the home of my father and therefore part of my heritage.

It features a group of feisty women, the youngest of whom is in her fifties (way younger than me), while the rest are old enough to know better. It’s packed full of humour—who wouldn’t laugh at the idea of the older generation behaving worse than the teenagers. And there’s a huge dollop of old Irish magic to add to the mix.

Despite the fact that this wonderful group of women seem to attract dead bodies like magnets, this is definitely in the cosy sub-genre. And I loved every word of this book and the rest of the series.

This is one of several excellent books that explores how nonhuman animals shaped cities (see also Andrew Robichaud’s Animal City, Frederick L. Brown’s The City is More Than Human, Dawn Day Biehler’s Pests in the City, and Hannah Velten’s Beastly London, for example). Cities are multispecies spaces and they have always been so, even as the history of a given city shifts and changes. When we walk through a city like Dublin today we may not immediately think about the many, many nonhuman animals who used to roam the same streets and pathways we walk on today. And yet, as Juliana Adelman explores in this book, there are hints and traces of this animal history if we know where to look.

In Dublin Hanged, Henry paints an evocative picture of the turn-of-the-eighteenth-century Irish capital collapsing under rising property crime, food shortages due to series of particularly inclement winters, and political unrest. He also vividly captures the events that led to the organisation of the first metropolitan uniformed police in the British Isles, which came to be widely unpopular. Henry shows, the organisation of the force was costly and in order to fund the new police, the household tax ‘skyrocketed’ virtually overnight. Henry’s analysis reveals there was a marked decline in the frequency of rape and violent assaults in the years following the introduction of the police in October 1786, indicating a degree of effectiveness of the new police despite the lack of its popularity.

When most people think of noir, they think of a cynical fedora-wearing, trenchcoated detective wisecracking his way through a mystery, and while that is part of the genre, it isn’t the whole of it. Noir can be funny, but that humor needs to be dark, and cynicism is a definite component. All of that is included in this book and it’s delivered with an Irish twist. Bruton’s hitman, Patrick Callen, who rides a bike through the streets of Dublin, is a man who likes lists: To-Do List: Kill Henry O’Neil, Meet the Bronze Man, Buy Food, Sleep with Olivia, Bike Shop, Visit Ma. But when he finds a baby on the job, it interrupts both his list and his life. A hitman and a baby—if that doesn’t make you want to read the book, nothing will.

Here I am recommending three books in one, because I think they should be read one after the other in a single holiday week where the rain is pouring down outside and you can lock yourself away and completely disappear into Doyle’s working-class Dublin universe. If you do not fall in love with the Rabbite family in all their imperfections, then uplit is not for you. I guarantee that no bad vibes will penetrate your mind while you are reading the Barrytown trilogy.