Like many others, I have waited with bated breath for the publication of the fourth novel by Irish literary sensation Sally Rooney. Intermezzo, in September. Rooney is both a distinctive voice in contemporary literature and the generational product of a particular moment in Irish history. As such, and in preparation for intermezzoI have once again looked at the work of some of her colleagues.
The Irish literary scene is thriving, so choosing just five other Irish writers who might appeal to Rooney fans is a daunting task. Some – like the matriarch of contemporary Irish literature Anne Enright or the one and only Claire Keegan – are so obvious they haven’t been mentioned.
Many others I have not mentioned, such as Rebecca Ivory, Maggie Armstrong, Niamh Mulvey, Caitríona Lally and Claire-Louise Bennett, have recently published work that has dispelled any doubts about the future health of Irish fiction.
1. EM Ready
Readers delighted by Rooney’s novel Normal people (2018) and his account of austerity politics might turn to EM Reapy for a different perspective on this difficult moment in recent Irish history and its impact on a generation of young people.
Red dirt (2016) is set in Australia and follows three young emigrants from recession-stricken Ireland. While Normal people highlights the subtle violence of austerity – the way it strips human life of its dignity – Red dirt is often openly violent. For example, when Fiona remarks, “We disappear. We Irish,” she is referring not only to the fleeting nature of seasonal work, but also to fellow travelers actually disappearing.
Absence is a structuring force throughout – each of the three protagonists is aware of the “parked cars”, “unoccupied property” and “suicides” they have left behind. The novel is full of Rooney-esque depictions of class difference – of expats shouting that the Celtic Tiger is “just on a bloody holiday Down Under” and of characters repeating with amusement, “I’ve got a BA, a postgraduate degree and an MA” while doing unskilled, low-paid work.
However, where Red dirt is perhaps more nuanced than Rooney’s college campus dramas, as it focuses on those who cannot break free from their class backgrounds through intelligence or merit. One of these characters aptly asks, “How could someone like me stay in Ireland? Ireland is only sad when the smart guys leave. Ireland has never given a damn about people like us.”
2. Niamh Campbell
Niamh Campbell’s debut novel, This happy (2020) mixes protagonist Alannah’s memories of an affair with an older playwright with her current marriage to a wealthy man.
While she interprets the former as an attempt to overcome her simple, social background, she is aware that her current life is only possible because she lives rent-free in her husband’s parents’ second home.
This happy announced the arrival of an immensely promising talent. Campbell’s successor from 2022, We were youngmore than fulfilled that promise. A meditation on art-making and Dublin, gender politics and gentrification, it follows Cormac, a thirty-something art lecturer who goes through life having one affair with one younger woman after another.
Cormac’s bad behavior is a foreshadowing of a much larger reckoning that unfolds throughout the novel. His fame-seeking complacency is reflected, as his former student and long-suffering lover Nina points out, in his artistic practice.
For those interested in Rooney’s novel Beautiful world, where are you (2021) and his reflections on the political utility of art is your next reading.
3. Nicole Flattery
Rooney is a fan of Nicole Flattery and wrote a blurb praising her “bold, irreverent and excruciatingly funny” debut short story collection. Show them a good time in 2019.
Set in global capitals like New York City and Paris, and in small, nameless towns in the Irish Midlands known only “to people with motion sickness,” this collection features female narrators as outsiders, and they see the uncanniness of the world we live in more clearly than anyone else.
While Show them a good time Flattery’s debut novel, Nothing Special (2023), is anchored in the present (mid-1990s to present), set in the Swinging Sixties. The novel’s captivating narrator, Mae, is a typist in Andy Warhol’s New York studio, The Factory.
One of the characters in Show them a good time states that “history didn’t happen in my town, not for me.” Teenager Mae witnesses it being made – and is no less alienated.
4. Michael Magee
Michael Magee was known to the literary scene long before the publication of his debut, Close to homein 2023. His work has been published in numerous Irish literary journals, and he is fiction editor at The Tangerine Magazinewhich he co-founded in 2016.
Since then, Magee has been on the shortlist for Sunday News He has been named New Author of the Year, won the Nero Book Award in one of its categories, and has been awarded both Waterstones Irish Book of the Year and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.
While Sally Rooney delves deeply into how college politics, with a capital P, mix with the interpersonal and romantic politics of young adulthood, Magee applies similar considerations to the dreaded post-graduation phase.
Close to home is set in Magee’s hometown of Belfast, where the protagonist Seán has returned after studying in the UK. This homecoming (to which the title refers) is ambivalent, as he tries to build an adult life in his hometown, which is plagued by structural youth unemployment and the ongoing effects of the Northern Ireland conflict.
Fans of Rooney might also like Magee’s interview with her three months after the release of Conversations with friends (2017).
5. Sara Baume
West Cork-based writer and artist Sara Baume is, in my opinion, one of the most exciting figures in contemporary Irish literature.
Her Costa Book Award-winning debut, Spill, simmer, sway (2015) traces the relationship between a lonely old man and the stray, one-eyed dog he takes in. Her next two books, A line created by walking (2017) and Crafts (2020) interweave visual art, art history and literary narrative.
In the first novel, 25-year-old artist Frankie suffers a nervous breakdown that causes her to leave the city and her menial job as a curator and move to her recently deceased grandmother’s house in the middle of nowhere. There she begins to photograph the dead animals she finds in her new surroundings. The novel’s description of the deep loneliness one feels when living in a world that is often uncaring and cruel moved me to tears more than once.
Baume’s latest novel, Seven church towers (2022) follows a similar premise. This time, however, it shifts the focus to a couple who move from the city to the country in search of what it might mean to live a good life. In this respect – Baume’s attempt to find a good life and the place of art in it – it most resembles the Rooney of Beautiful world, where are you.
Orlaith Darling, PhD candidate, Contemporary English Literature and Critical Theory, Trinity College Dublin
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
