100 Books Like We Don't Know Ourselves

How to address the bloody past is constantly debated in Northern Ireland. The lawyers can’t get it right, nor the politicians or police. Yet this writer does. The book strips everything away and leaves, well, the bones. It’s a father-and-son story. The former, an ex-paramilitary, takes in the troubled latter. The prison veteran father has been trying to be better. The lovesick son is trying to be normal. Both remain curiously opaque, their stories not quite gelling. These are precision-hewn Troubles characters, murderer and son, never as disappointed in each other as they are with themselves. Theirs is a small house filled with history and filling up with paranoia and mistrust. And we learn it all via a prison diary. A mighty debut novel.

In contrast to earlier works on the Garda history, Conway frames policing experience in Ireland by examining its history and development in the context of post-colonialism, its impact, and lived experiences. As Ireland achieved independence, she shows, ‘time constraints and lack of alternative experience led to the retention of many core features of colonial policing’, resulting in an organisation ideologically different but practically similar to the Irish forces of the preceding century. In 1925, the new police of the Irish Free State absorbed the Dublin Metropolitan Police, the Civic Guards, who filled the niche left vacant by the disbanded Constabulary, and contentiously, many ex-RIC men. Conway skillfully weaves gardaí interviews into this varied contemporary history of policing the Republic of Ireland.

The emergence of the violent phase of the conflict in Northern Ireland (euphemistically known as ‘The Troubles’) in the late 1960s has been subject to much debate over the years. But there is a danger that, given what happened once the violence erupted, its origins and their complexity have been obscured. 

Many now see the conflict as simply about which jurisdiction should have sovereignty over the region. I like that Bob Purdie’s book on the civil rights movement (CRM) brought nuance and complexity back into the debate. The tendency of some books to either downplay the CRM or portray it as just another facet of the constitutional/jurisdictional question is avoided (and indeed refuted) in this book.

Purdie encourages us to question the structures and politics of Northern Ireland before the violence started and to examine the relationship between the CRM and the violence that followed it. The book made me… show more.

Edna O’Brien’s 2012 autobiography Country Girl is a blunt, gripping, lyrical and non-self-pitying depiction of her early life in the west of Ireland. It exposes the stultifying conformity imposed by the Catholic Church, family and community which I experienced myself. She rebelled as she sought freedom and self-expression from a domineering mother and drunken father. Edna’s escape to Dublin, London and New York as well as her exile from Ireland reflects an individual addicted to drugs and alcohol who seeks acknowledgement, liberty and success through many failed relationships. Edna’s autobiography resonates with many of my own experiences of the 1960’s. Country Girl demonstrates how one Irish female writer broke the cultural silence so that others would not feel alone. Her writing was an inspiration to me for my own memoir.

This book, for younger readers, is a collection of retellings of some of Ireland’s most well-known stories like Oisín in Tír na nÓg, as well as less famous ones like Son of an Otter, Son of a Wolf. Doyle writes terrifically well, perfectly pitching his tales at a young audience. Illustrated by Niamh Sharkey in her distinctive style, this is a collection to be treasured. I loved the pronunciation guide for the Irish names, as well as the introduction and the page about Doyle’s sources.

Perhaps no book has moved me more than Ireland by Frank Delaney. 

Through a series of tales told by an itinerant storyteller the author paints a series of haunting, vivid portraits of Irish history. Each story stands alone, but over the course of three nights of story-telling, the pieces of this mosaic come together, revealing a clearer history than most history books could hope to present. 

Delaney reaches deeper historical facts and allows a rare glimpse into how people felt and what they believed. I felt that I was listening to the storyteller, rather than reading words. This presents the Irish people in a unique and engaging light.

This is a great book that you cannot put down. It reminds me of my favorite series, Outlander. Going back through time is something that a lot of us dream about, but never experience. I love a good love story, but this book also has mystery, intrigue, and pulls at your heartstrings. I consider it Historical Fiction because even though we cannot travel through time, there were a lot of women that had the same feelings and trauma in the 1920s that the main character went through. 

Notorious for its violence, the 17th century is also a time of sweeping change. Change ignites resistance. When I first started researching Irish history, I was well aware of Cromwell’s march, and soon discovered much more and perhaps worse. How could people survive under constant threat and fear? How could humans justify such cruelty? This book examines several horrific events, the people and the policies that allowed them to happen—in the interest of learning from history that which we should never repeat.

This is a lovely and well-written young adult book of a girl who explores her sexuality and faces the many challenges of being a teenager in modern Ireland.

There are no holds barred in the telling of some of the incidents, and the protagonist Lauren ends up facing every teenage girl’s worst nightmare. Acceptance of difference is a strong theme through the novel and recent Irish referendums on Equal (Same Sex) marriage and legislation to legalise abortion in Ireland are seen from a young person’s valuable point of view.

I’ve always been interested in developments in Irish history during the under-studied seventeenth century. This was the period when many of the political, social, and economic foundations of modern Ireland emerged. The century began during the major upheaval of the Nine Years’ War and witnessed two more major conflicts—the 1641 Rebellion (which lasted until 1653) and the Williamite War of the 1690s. However, Gillespie’s book is unusual in that it focuses on the various efforts made to reach accommodations between natives and settlers, Catholics and Protestants, the Gaelic Irish, the Old English, and the New English, during the decades between these conflicts. All in all, a fascinating read which shows that things might have evolved differently had these efforts succeeded.