The Book Club is reading ... The Glorious Heresies

Gavin McCrea: I wanted to punish Engels for betraying ideals but revenge was his

When I set out to write a novel from the perspective of Lizzie Burns, for whom the enemy of Victorian family values capitulated, my intentions were not altogether virtuous

‘The subtlety of narration in Mrs Engels is breathtaking’

‘Mrs Engels is a profound achievement of remarkable subtlety and insight, a novel which illuminates the power, limitations and gaps in our stories of the past’

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The dialectics of desire: Mrs Engels by Gavin McCrea

Manchester Irish author and historian Joseph O’Neill praises a splendid exploration of love’s complexities and contradictions between political ideals and personal realities

‘Let us hear’: fiction can give voice to unrecorded words of working class

Mary and Lizzie Burns are the silent voices in Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England. Our imaginations must transform these slight historical figures into the massive fictional characters they deserve to be

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Mrs Engels: ‘I picked it up for the genre and idea, but kept reading for the voice’

I am much more alive to the promise and the peril of the first-person narrator than I ever was before I started trying to write a book in one. And this narrator got me. Wow, did she, writes Kathleen Flynn of the New York Times

Mrs Engels author Gavin McCrea on the Irish sisters who inspired Engels and Marx

To the lives of Mary and Lizzie Burns, we have no guide. These two illiterate Irishwomen, by their actions and associations, wrote themselves into history. Despite, or perhaps because of their lack of historical weight, I adored them instantly and decided to write a novel about them

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Lizzie Burns on love: ‘What matters is the mint that jangles in his pocket’

In this extract from Mrs Engels by Gavin McCrea, his protagonist, an illiterate Irishwoman who became Friedrich Engels’ partner, offers some hard-nosed advice on love

The Irish women behind Engels and the birth of communism

Gavin McCrea’s research into the elusive, illiterate Lizzie Burns is now a historical novel

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Mrs Engels by Gavin McCrea: The Irish Times Book Club title for February

This acclaimed debut novel is based on the true but little-known story of an illiterate Irishwoman from a Manchester slum who was Friedrich Engels’ common-law wife

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‘The short story is my first love, but you don’t necessarily marry your first love’

Thomas Morris admits he went from lampooning turgidly boring fiction to writing it himself before discovering the music of letting things happen in his stories

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A Q&A with Thomas Morris and Hannah Griffiths, his editor at Faber

‘We have many established great literary writers at Faber. The challenge – and perhaps the most thrilling part of the job – is to find the next generation of great writers’

‘I didn’t represent Tom Morris’s collection, but I wish I had’

Despite the predominant aimlessness of these shipwrecked lives, and the aroma of sadness arising from the stories, I found myself buoyed up by the prose’s flinty energy

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‘A profound commitment to the pursuit of meaning in life’s marginal zones’

Philip Coleman, who taught Thomas Morris at Trinity College Dublin, says his debut is an important, lasting contribution to the debate on what stories can do and why they matter

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A Welsh view of Thomas Morris: an exile’s sharpened vision and a Joycean ambition

This self-imposed exile from Caerphilly has unquestionably given Morris the level of detachment necessary to write about it without becoming bogged down in sentimentality

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Colin Barrett on Thomas Morris: ‘a forensic melancholy and tender humour’

The conceit of a repeating locale, instead of acting as a curb on imaginative possibility, actually allows the wised-up writer to explore prismatic variations of tone and sensibility

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‘Shoreditch had seen stranger things than wrestling a hobby-horse into a photo booth’

Irish Times Book Club author Thomas Morris asks Faber’s senior designer, Luke Bird, how he developed the distinctive cover to We Don’t Know What We’re Doing

‘It’s an editor’s dream to find a writer like Tom, whose work is relevant and consoling’

While the characters in all of the stories seemed to be struggling to connect and to feel loved, reading the book made me feel less alone. Isn’t this the measure of great writing? asks Hannah Griffiths, Thomas Morris's editor at Faber

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Irish Times Book Club: We Don’t Know What We’re Doing, by Thomas Morris

The bittersweet, funny and emotionally mature debut short story collection by the Welsh-born editor of Stinging Fly magazine is our recommended read for January

All the Boys, a short story by Thomas Morris

A holiday read - The 12 Stories of Christmas, Day 12: the poignant but funny tale with a twist of a Welsh stag party in Temple Bar, from January’s Irish Times Book Club author

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Review: We Don’t Know What We’re Doing, by Thomas Morris

Fresh, at times brilliant, debut short story collection portrays lost souls in Wales

A tingling pleasure: Stinging Fly editor Thomas Morris on art of the short story

On the eve of publication of his debut collection, We Don’t Know What We’re Doing, the Dublin-based Welsh author sets out his manifesto of what writers should be doing

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Those That I Fight I Do Not Hate, a short story by Danielle McLaughlin

First published in The Irish Times as part of our This Means War summer fiction series in 2014, this is a story of bad behaviour simmering under a serene suburban surface

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Declan Meade: ‘Danielle is so bloody talented. She cares deeply about the text’

Authors & Editors: Danielle McLaughlin and her editor at Stinging Fly talk to Sarah Bannan about their working relationship and how her debut collection came about

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Maurice or Diary of a Short Story by Danielle McLaughlin

The Irish Times Book Club author of Dinosaurs on Other Planets explores the convoluted evolution of one story, The Smell of Dead Flowers, over many drafts

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Dinosaurs on Other Planets: ‘intelligent, multi-layered stories which demand a lot’

Danielle McLaughlin’s stories filter through so deeply you can be forgiven for thinking they are your own, half-remembered dreams

Danielle McLaughlin cracks her whip

Dinosaurs on Other Planets is a story of loss and opposites, writer Ethel Rohan suggests. Themes of distance, grief and the desire for connection are conveyed in striking language

Dissecting Danielle McLaughlin: the inside story of her writers’ group

Marie Gethins has been in a writers’ group with Danielle McLaughlin for four years. She reveals its methods and secrets: ‘a stellar combination of brutal honesty and kindness’

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Dinosaurs on Other Planets, a short story by Danielle McLaughlin

A difficult daughter returns home with a son and lover in tow, testing the tense equilibrium of her parents’ strained marriage

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Danielle McLaughlin’s Dinosaurs on Other Planets: The Irish Times Book Club

‘This is not a debut in the usual sense: a promise of greater things to come. There is no need to ask what Danielle McLaughlin will do next, she has done it already’: Anne Enright

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Dinosaurs on Other Planets by Danielle McLaughlin: Planet-sized problems of humanity

A stirring debut collection on the loneliness of being alive

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Leaving the law behind to chase the writer’s dream

Danielle McLaughlin, a former solicitor, brings a forensic approach to detail to her short stories

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In Through the Skin, a short story by Danielle McLaughlin

This is the winning entry in the Merriman Short Story Competition

All the Dead Birds by Danielle McLaughlin

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Caitriona Lally on Madame Bovary, Beryl the Peril and other heroines

‘I work as a cleaner in Trinity College and when I get to dust the bookshelves in the Old Library, it smells like musty heaven. I can’t imagine ever sniffing an ebook’

‘A lot of Eggshells is from conversations I overheard. People just have no filter’

‘You do write the book you want to read, and I love reading books that aren’t perfectly plotted and aren’t all wrapped up tidily at the end’

UCD academic Áine Mahon on Eggshells by Caitriona Lally: ‘a delightful debut’

The defining purpose of fiction is to make us less lonely, said David Foster Wallace. In Eggshells, we see his insight finely sketched and coloured in

‘I’m glad I didn’t know Eggshells would be published: not knowing was liberating’

Authors and Editors: Caitriona Lally and her editor Zoë Jellicoe discuss with Sarah Bannan how Eggshells came together

Dublin, what a character

Dublin is as much a character in Caitriona Lally’s Eggshells as her troubled protagonist Vivian, its buildings and signs and citizens observed in great and telling detail

Declan Kiberd on Eggshells: ‘an edgy and visionary book’

Caitriona Lally’s successful fusion of fairy-lore with an urban setting reminds me of the great James Stephens – she combines his fabulism with a radical social analysis

Rosita Sweetman on Eggshells: ‘without a doubt the best new novel of the year’

That Lally has managed to make her unusual heroine not only utterly lovable but also utterly believable is the core of Eggshells’ genius

Eggshells: ‘methodically mad, laugh-out-loud funny, scalpel-sharp witty and deeply poetic’

Amanda Piesse of Trinity College Dublin praises Caitriona Lally’s creation of an endearing character in a novel that celebrates eccentricity and reimagines Dublin

The Book Club: An extract from Eggshells by Caitriona Lally

In the opening chapter we meet Vivan as she begins her daily exploration of Dublin

The oddball narrators of 21st-century Irish literature

Caitriona Lally on Sara Baume’s Ray, Donal Ryan’s Johnsey and Daniel Seery’s Tom, whose outsider perspectives enable them to comment on mainstream Irish society

Anthony Glavin on Eggshells by Caitriona Lally: a novel that keeps its promises

Give yourself a treat with the the patent artistry of this wise, highly crafted and patently heartfelt novel, a paean to Dublin and a work filled with pleasure, pathos and pain

Eggshells by Caitriona Lally: ‘priceless thoughts on words and the world’

Vivian rescues much more than just contemporary Dublin. She also resuscitates the magic of language and how the world can shrink your life or expand it

Review: Eggshells, by Caitriona Lally: full of action and humour

Walking around Dublin in search of a fairytale world

Caitriona Lally on writing Eggshells: from the dole to a debut novel

A first-time author’s compelling and frank account of the impact of losing a job and how the experience formed her as a writer

Eggshells by Caitriona Lally is new Irish Times Book Club choice

This witty, unusual debut novel is the story of Vivian, another of contemporary Irish fiction’s memorably eccentric outsiders, and her detailed daily explorations of Dublin

Louise O’Neill on writing Asking For It: Unblurring the lines about rape

Horrified by the shaming of a US rape victim, the author started to think about how a small Irish community would have reacted, where the football team are local gods and where boys will be boys but girls must be virgins

Asking for It, by Louise O’Neill: brave, clever, provocative but relentless

Review: A harrowing novel on the issue of sexual consent asks important questions of the reader, writes Sarah Gilmartin

‘There’s a feeling of: it’s okay to have sex, but not too much sex’

Louise O’Neill’s second novel is inspired by victim-blaming after assaults at US high schools

Louise O’Neill: ‘I try and constantly cut back on the excess in my writing’

‘Writing is the way in which I can make sense of the world. I always say that I feel like a shadow, a spectre at the feast when I am not writing. I write myself back into existence’

Speaking up: a brief history of rape culture in young adult fiction

Asking For It engages the media and popular culture but also its own field, YA, which since the 1950s has pushed boundaries and explored adolescence in edgy, realistic ways

Rape culture: a cultural response by Alvy Carragher and Louise O’Neill

The authors of Asking for It and Numb explore each other’s work, whose common themes are men who don’t know what no means and a society unable to define rape

Marian Keyes: ‘Asking For It is the most relevant, most exciting book about Ireland in a very long time’

‘Asking For It is definitely polemic. But it’s also an excellent novel, a great read, a gripping page-turner with brilliant characterisation’

An extract from Louise O’Neill’s Asking For It, plus win copies and podcast tickets

Sample the first few pages of our Book Club novel, and enter a competition to win one of 10 copies plus tickets to a podcast interview in association with the Irish Writers Centre

Asking For It by Louise O’Neill is the new Irish Times Book Club choice

A searing account of a rape and its aftermath in a close-knit Irish community, Asking For It looks set to enjoy the crossover success of O’Neill’s YA debut, Only Ever Yours

Brought to Book: Joseph O’Connor on why reading is a more creative act than writing

‘If there is a Hell being prepared for me, it will be a dinner party. But I’d like to be in a bar, late at night in New York, with Colm Toibin, Patti Smith, Dickens, St John of the Cross, Toni Morrison, Keats and Emily Bronte, with her brother Branwell leading the singsong while arm-wrestling’

Rock fable that strikes chord as pure pop fiction: The Thrill of It All

Review: Joseph O’Connor has swapped his high style for a talky approach in this homage to rock’n’roll

Making a ‘singable song’: PJ Mathews on the fiction of Joseph O’Connor

A UCD academic traces the evolution of our Book Club author from his debut, Cowboys & Indians, to his masterpiece, Star of the Sea, and explores recurring themes of emigration, social justice and the tensions between espoused beliefs and personal motivations

Geoff Mulligan on Joseph O’Connor: ‘Joe has never been afraid of challenges’

Authors & Editors – Joseph O’Connor on Geoff Mulligan: ‘Geoff took a manuscript that was cripplingly long and unwieldy and helped me sculpt it into a literary novel that is also a page-turner’

Banana Republic: memories of a suburban Irish childhood

Bob Geldof is one of several real-life musicians to appear as characters in The Thrill of it All. In this extract from a memoir-in-progress, Joseph O’Connor remembers growing up with the Rats

Declan Kiberd on his star pupil Joseph O’Connor: laureate of a lost generation

There is a secret world of male and female hurt which Joe understands and articulates better than most – and it reminds us not only of the need to laugh adversity off but also that every joke is an epitaph on an emotion

Joseph O’Connor: ‘I’m uncomfortable with the idea of a novel being “about” anything’

The Book Club author on the magic of music, the Irish in England, The Thrill of it All as an entertainment, and why his lead singer Fran Mulvey is a descendant of Star of the Sea’s Pius Mulvey

An out-take from an early demo of The Thrill of it All, plus 12 copies to be won

This Wikipedia-style entry appeared in an early draft of our Book Club novel by Joseph O’Connor. It tells the history of the band at the heart of the story

Irish anarchy in the UK: music’s role in Joseph O’Connor’s The Thrill of it All

Anthony Roche of UCD traces the various musical traditions and acts, from Elvis to Phil Chevron via the Rolling Stones and Patti Smith, which drive and enliven the narrative

Inspiring then, inspiring still: a hymn of praise to Patti Smith

Joseph O’Connor pays tribute to one of the figures who inspired The Thrill of it All

The Book Club: An extract from The Thrill of it All by Joseph O’Connor

In the opening chapter of The Irish Times Book Club choice for August, the protagonist recalls meeting his future bandmate for the first time in 1980s London

The Lives of Women, by Christine Dwyer Hickey review

A modern valley of squinting windows: rendering the rigidly gender-specific world of the recent past and exploring the frightening gap between generations that is at the heart of the novel’s tragedy

An extract from The Lives of Women, by Christine Dwyer Hickey

How do you tell the story of yourself as you were more than 30 years ago? How do you know what you were like then? The workings of your troubled mind and heart – how do you begin to resolve all that?

Christine Dwyer Hickey Q&A: my influences, from Mrs Dalloway to Janice Galloway

‘There is no better way to appreciate another culture or to begin to understand the lives of others than through a well-written novel’

The Lives of Women: ‘In a way, I was always going to write this novel’

I think it’s fair to say that The Lives of Women is not just a novel set in the suburbs, it is a novel of the suburbs, writes Christine Dwyer Hickey

John Montague on Christine Dwyer Hickey: ‘a rich and varied oeuvre’

One of Ireland’s finest poets reviews the career of our Book Club author, from Tatty to The Lives of Women: 'her work sustains a voice, and evokes a place, with exceptional control'

The Lives of Women by Christine Dwyer Hickey is the new Irish Times Book Club pick

A modern Valley of the Squinting Windows moved from small-town Ireland to suburbia

Podcast: the Book Club meets Eoin McNamee

Eoin Mc Namee discusses Blue is the Night with Martin Doyle and two Book Club readers in the Irish Times studio

Eoin McNamee: a capital crime writer

A decade after writing The Blue Tango about a real-life murder, the author revisited another crime scene in Orchid Blue. Martin Doyle interviews a true great of true crime

Miscarriage of justice made into a masterpiece

Last in trilogy of literary thrillers exploring North’s dark underbelly

Turning true crime into true blue fiction

Eoin McNamee’s ‘blue’ novels explore Northern Ireland before the Troubles

Northern Irish noir – the crime of Cain and the cult of Calvin

The Patricia Curran case has all the attributes of classic noir, says Eoin McNamee. It is easy to imagine the whole affair transposed from Belfast to 1950s Los Angeles, Black Dahlia territory

Eoin McNamee Q&A: ‘I can’t think of a good piece of funny writing which didn’t turn around and kick you in the teeth’

‘When I was young I had a knack for reading things I didn’t really understand and being caught up in their slipstream. I read Brighton Rock when I was 12 or 13’

Eoin McNamee on Patricia Curran’s murder: still haunting after all these years

Irish Times Book Club: the author reflects on his fascination with a murder victim and her ‘gothic’ family that began when he was eight and has fuelled his outstanding Blue trilogy

Eoin McNamee’s Blue is the Night wins €15,000 Kerry Group Irish Novel of Year Award

Paul Muldoon wins €5,000 Pigott Poetry Prize for One Thousand Things Worth Knowing at ceremony to mark opening of Listowel Writers’ Week

Blue is the Night by Eoin McNamee is the new Irish Times Book Club choice

Win one of 12 signed copies of what author David Peace called ‘a genuine, original masterpiece’

Podcast: the Book Club meets Mary Costello, author of Academy Street

This month we've been reading Mary Costello's debut novel Academy Street, so invited her into studio to meet some book club readers and discuss her book

Mary Costello on the shelter of words and the rightness of writing

VIDEO: ‘People say it’s a lonely occupation, writing. Writers say so too. But I think we’re at our least lonely when we write. I think we write our way out of loneliness’

Deus Absconditus, a short story by Mary Costello

‘He begins to intuit the shudder, the intimation of terror, that all of nature must have felt that day, must go on feeling, because of what lies within any moment, because of what grows and ferments in vials and cylinders and the minds of men’

Mary Costello: in praise of the M6, the secret of my creative drive

For the Irish Times Book Club author, inspiration can strike anywhere, but as often as not it’s behind the wheel en route to Galway

A worthy rival to Colm Tóibín and David Mitchell: Academy Street

Mary Costello uses restrained writing and characterisation to paint decades of a migrant life in New York

Mary Costello on the twinkle in Edna O’Brien’s eye

Mary Costello’s tribute to the author who inspired her: ‘she is in person, like her writing, open and trusting, searingly honest, gleeful, mischievous too’

Mary Costello’s New York diary, August 2011

Irish Times Book Club: The Academy Street author swapped her house in Kimmage for a Manhattan apartment to write. Here she explores the city and reveals her writing process

An extract from Academy Street by Mary Costello: 1962 – Tess arrives in New York

Book club: ‘They looked at each other now. In the look was an acknowledgement, a declaration, an affirmation that everything was finally settled, and the lives being lived here were the right ones, the ideal lives’

Mary Costello: how I came to write Academy Street

‘The ache for home, for belonging, is probably one of the more obvious themes in Academy Street. It’s not just a physical home that Tess longs for, but a metaphysical one too – that perpetual ache in mankind for Paradise, Eden, the longing to touch something sublime or numinous’

We need to talk about Colin Barrett: a round-up of reviews, interviews and musings

A variety of takes on Young Skins and some thoughts from the award-winning author himself

Brutal sketches of small-town alienation

Rural stories of isolation and dark humour

Growing up in Co Mayo helped Colin Barrett shape wild visual narratives written in local voices

A Q&A with Colin Barrett, this month’s Irish Times Book Club author

‘I would have loved to have read the Game of Thrones series when I was around 14 or so. I would have definitely thought they were the greatest books ever written’

Ontario, a short story by Colin Barrett

A short story that segues into an analysis of why it couldn’t be finished. ‘It’s either quasi/meta/auto fiction or a pseudo-nonfictional piece,’ the author says. ‘In a roundabout way, it is very much about the nature of inspiration’

A Book Club short story: The Clancy Kid, by Colin Barrett

Taken from his award-winning short story collection, Young Skins, this month's Irish Times Book Club choice, this is a powerful tale of lost youth in the west of Ireland

Young Skins by Colin Barrett is the new Irish Times Book Club reading choice

The debut short story collection has won the Guardian first book award, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award

A Q&A with Audrey Magee about The Undertaking

‘Peter and Katharina’s romance would never have been without the war, but could never be because of it’

From war to fiction: ‘I didn’t care about AK-47s, I cared about people’

While reporting on conflict as a journalist, Audrey Magee saw how people created distance with talk of weaponry, and her first novel looks at the psychological impact of war

An extract from The Undertaking, by Audrey Magee, the latest Irish Times Book Club choice

The first two chapters: a soldier marries a photograph of a woman he has never met to escape the Russian front on honeymoon leave, then he meets her and her family in Nazi Berlin

The Undertaking, by Audrey Magee: the new Irish Times Book Club reading choice

Join with us over the next few weeks as we explore this acclaimed wartime love story

Book club taster: chapter one of The Closet of Savage Mementos

Extract: The Irish Times Book Club is reading The Closet of Savage Mementos by Nuala Ní Chonchúir, published by New Island. Here's an extract from chapter one. We'll be discussing the book on next week's audio podcast and webchat. Why not read here and join in

The Book Club - You're not reading alone: questions to keep you focused

We'll be reading the Closet of Savage Mementos until January 15th so here Sarah Gilmartin has put together some book club conversation starters. Don't forget to look out for our audio podcast with the author in mid-January

The Closet of Savage Mementos: are you reading with us?

The Book Club: We're reading Nuala Ní Chonchúir's Closet of Savage Mementos. Are you reading with us? We'd love to hear what you think so far. We'll be reading and posting about this book until mid-January

‘Novels are work, day in, day out’: Nuala Ni Chonchuir

Are you reading our book of the month? Here, Nuala Ní Chonchúir, the author of this month’s Book Club choice ‘The Closet of Savage Mementos’, talks writing and the books business

Poetic, poignant and funny: The Closet of Savage Mementos

Review: Nuala Ní Chonchúir’s second novel doesn’t flinch when tackling the dark truths of human behaviour

The Closet of Savage Mementos, by Nuala Ní Chonchúir

This month’s Irish Times Book Club choice is a moving, beautifully written portrait of love, grief and motherhood

A curate’s egg of a novel: A History of Loneliness

Retired English teacher and Book Club member Vincent Hanley finds much to admire but also to criticise in John Boyne’s novel

Rest Day, by John Boyne

First published in The Irish Times last December, John Boyne’s war story has won the Writing.ie Short Story of the Year award

Loneliness and the priesthood

‘I have a history of loneliness. Don’t you?’ says one priest to another in A History of Loneliness, giving John Boyne’s book its title. Here, a real-life priest explores the condition

Brought to Book: John Boyne on Noddy, Homer Wells, ‘Birdsong’ and a Kindle tip

‘I am at my happiest when I have completed a first draft of a novel and am about to begin a second’

What does a priest make of John Boyne’s portrayal of Fr Odran Yates?

Fr Martin Boland compares John Boyne’s portrayal of a cleric unfavourably to the works of Graham Greene, Georges Bernanos, Shusaku Endo, Brian Moore, Andrew O’Hagan and William Peter Blatty

John Boyne: ‘The Catholic priesthood blighted my youth and the youth of people like me’

John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, grew up gay in Dublin. Now, after years of silence he is finally ready to write about sexual abuse within the church – and to talk about the effect it has had on his life

The Book Quiz: bless me father for I have quizzed

Separate your Teds from your Dougals in this week's priestly book quiz, a genuflection to the theme of our Book Club choice, John Boyne's A History of Loneliness

Book Club: four questions to set you thinking about A History of Loneliness

Christina Hunt Mahony reviewed John Boyne’s novel for us when it came out. Here she suggests some aspects you might like to explore

This month's Book Club choice: A History of Loneliness, by John Boyne

The first Irish Times Book Club choice is the bestselling Dublin author’s 13th novel, but the first to be set in Ireland. It tells the story of abuse in the Catholic Church seen through the eyes of a good priest. Now read on

The Book Quiz: it's the John Boyne special

John Boyne is this month's featured book club writer. Think you know him better than most? Try this week's quiz and find out if you're right