Hello, readers! It is Monday again! As it is Monday, welcome to another #5OnMyTBR update. The rule is relatively simple. I must pick five books from my to-be-read piles that fit the week’s theme.

This week’s theme: No Prompt

Since there is still no prompt this week, I opted to feature works of Irish literature. I just learned that today is Constitution Day in Ireland. It has been commemorated annually since 1937, when the current constitution came into force. Reading-wise, Irish literature is one of my favorites. There is just something lyrical about Irish writers. Without ado, here are some books written by Irish writers that I am looking forward to.

5OnMyTBR is a bookish meme hosted by E. @ Local Bee Hunter’s Nook where you choose five books from your to-be-read pile that fit that week’s theme. If you’d like more info, head over to the announcement post!

Title: TransAtlantic
Author: Colum McCann
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Publishing Date: 2013
No. of Pages: 298

Synopsis: 

1919. Emily Ehrlich watches as two young airmen, Alcock and Brown, emerge from the carnage of the First World War to pilot the very first non-stop transatlantic flight from Newfoundland to the west of Ireland. Among the letters being carried on the aircraft is one which will not be opened for almost a hundred years.

1845. Frederick Douglass, a black American slave, lands in Ireland to champion ideas of democracy and freedom, only to find a famine unfurling at his feet. On his travels he inspires a young maid to go to New York to embrace a free world, but America does not always fulfill its promises for her. From the fierce battlefields of the Civil War to the ice lakes of northern Missouri, it is her youngest daughter Emily who eventually finds her way back to Ireland.

1998. Senator George Mitchell criss-crosses the ocean in search of an elusive Irish peace. How many more bereaved mothers and grandmothers must he meet before an agreement can be reached?

Elegantly stitching these stories together, National Book Award-winning author Colum McCann explores the fine line between what is real and what is imagined, between fiction and non-fiction, between promise and memory. Can we pass from the new world to the old? How does the past shape the future? How does even the most unassuming moment of grace have a ripple effect on our lives? Intricately crafted, poetic and deeply affecting, TransAtlantic is an outstanding act of literary bravura.

Title: Old God’s Time
Author: Sebastian Barry
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 2024 (2023)
No. of Pages: 261

Synopsis: 

Recently retired policeman Tom Kettle is settling into the quiet of his new home, a lean-to annexed to a Victorian castle overlooking the Irish Sea. For months he has barely seen a soul, catching only glimpses of his eccentric landlord and a nervous young mother who has moved in next door. Occasionally, fond memories return of his family: his beloved wife, June, and their two children, Winnie and Joe. But when two former colleagues turn up at his door with questions about a decades-old case, one that Tom never quite came to terms with, he finds himself pulled into the darkest currents of his past. A beautiful, haunting novel in which nothing is quite as it seems, Old God’s Time is about what we live through, what we live with, and what may survive of us.

Title: Nora Webster
Author: Colm Tóibín
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 2015
No. of Pages: 311

Synopsis: 

Nora Webster is recently widowed. Unmoored by her sudden loss and the needs of her children whom she now must raise alone, she faces a future that was never meant to be. But within Nora is a strength – a quiet resolve not to succumb to others’ expectations – and through the discovery of music and gift of friendship, she may just find a way to live again.

Title: Conversations with Friends
Author: Sally Rooney

Synopsis: 

A sharply intelligent novel about two college students and the strange, unexpected connection they forge with a married couple.

Frances is twenty-one years old, cool-headed, and darkly observant. A college student and aspiring writer, she devotes herself to a life of the mind–and to the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi, her best friend and comrade-in-arms. Lovers at school, the two young women now perform spoken-word poetry together in Dublin, where a journalist named Melissa spots their potential. Drawn into Melissa’s orbit, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman’s sophisticated home and tall, handsome husband. Private property, Frances believes, is a cultural evil–and Nick, a bored actor who never quite lived up to his potential, looks like patriarchy made flesh. But however amusing their flirtation seems at first, it gives way to a strange intimacy neither of them expect. As Frances tries to keep her life in check, her relationships increasingly resist her control: with Nick, with her difficult and unhappy father, and finally even with Bobbi. Desperate to reconcile herself to the desires and vulnerabilities of her body, Frances’s intellectual certainties begin to yield to something new: a painful and disorienting way of living from moment to moment.

Written with gem-like precision and probing intelligence, Conversations With Friends is wonderfully alive to the pleasures and dangers of youth. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: A Severed Head
Author: Iris Murdoch

Synopsis: 

As macabre as a Jacobean tragedy, as frivolous as a Restoration comedy, Iris Murdoch’s fifth novel takes sombre themes – adultery, incest, castration, violence and suicide – and yet succeeds in making of them a book that is brilliantly enjoyable. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: Quentins
Author: Maeve Binchy

Synopsis: 

Every table at Quentins Restaurant has a thousand stories to tales of love, betrayal and revenge. There has been great hope and deep despair. The staff who come and go have stories of their own, and the restaurant itself has had times when it looked set fair for success and others when it seemed doomed to failure. Ella Brady wants to make a documentary about the renowned Dublin restaurant that has captured the spirit of a generation and a city in the years it has been open. (Source: Goodreads)