Irish Essays, Commentary & Cultural Writing Books

Tucked away in Dublin's north inner city, Monto made headlines for wild tales of debauchery. However, what happened to the women and girls within its brothels in life and death is less well known. Weaving together oral histories, …

Like the rest of us, Carl Kinsella has spent the last ten years trying to find a way to navigate modern life, mental health and the internet. Well, maybe not quite like the rest of us.From starting a rumour that convinced much of …

Since it arrived on the airwaves in 1961, RTÉ has been buffeted in different directions, eventually slipping into a steady decline which accelerated over the past decade into a catastrophe. The 2023 revelations regarding secret pa…

In March 2017, Tina Satchwell vanished from her home in Youghal, County Cork. For six and a half years, her disappearance remained one of Ireland’s most haunting mysteries. Her husband Richard Satchwell claimed she had left with t…

Martin Doyle, Books Editor of The Irish Times, has been an arts journalist for more than 35 years and in that time has interviewed many of the most talented and successful Irish writers at different stages of their careers. This s…

Dead as Doornails, first published in 1976, brings back into print a true classic of Irish memoir. Anthony Cronin’s account of life in post-war literary Dublin is as funny and colourful as one would expect from an intimate of Bren…

BIOGRAPHY OF THE YEAR 2025 - AN POST IRISH BOOK AWARDSA shocking true story of heartbreak and survival by Sarah Corbett Lynch, daughter of Jason Corbett - an Irish Times Number 1 bestseller and the subject of NETFLIX documentary A…

Betsy Cornwell left home with her baby on his first birthday, checking into a hotel under a false name so her husband could not track them down. Over the long months of housing insecurity that followed, bouncing around cheap motel…

The Turning Tide is a hymn to a sea passage of world-historical importance. Combining social and cultural history, nature-writing, travelogue and politics, Welshman Jon Gower charts a sea which has carried both Vikings and saints;…

As Ireland's Minister for Housing, Eoghan Murphy took on one of the toughest briefs in government, one that continues to be a challenge today. Looking back at his life in the build-up to parliamentary office and at his time in the…

Immerse yourself in the rich history and cultural significance of the Irish pub, from its humble beginnings in the 17th century to its modern incarnation as a global phenomenon. This book offers a comprehensive examination of the …

Dear Gay was an instant bestseller when it was published in 2023. PS Gay brings readers more letters and memories from the listeners of Ireland’s most iconic radio show. PS Gay reflects the very fabric of our society from the ligh…

The Irish weather. Subject of endless conversations, the saviour of small talk and famously unreliable. We all know it well, as a constant, if capricious, backdrop to our lives.But how well do we really know it? While our relation…

The first collection of Booker Prize-winning writer Anne Enright's non-fiction writing about culture, literature and her own life.For thirty years Anne Enright has been paying attention: casting her lucid and distinctive gaze acro…

Malcolm Macarthur was a well-known Dublin socialite.  Suave and urbane, he passed his days mingling with artists and aristocrats, reading philosophy, living a life of the mind. But by 1982, his inheritance had dwindled to almost n…

In At Least It Looks Good From Space, journalist Carl Kinsella attempts to solve the great human mystery of why we are the way we are in this chaotic era of internet algorithms, disinformation campaigns (Carl's only responsible fo…

A beloved Irish institution, RTÉ Radio 1’s Sunday Miscellany has been woven into the lives of listeners for over half a century. Following on from the bestselling 2023 anthology, this collection brings together some of the best br…

The real story behind Dunnes Stores, the most quintessentially Irish shop of all, and the family drama behind it. This is the story of the extraordinary family behind one of Ireland's most famous businesses, Dunnes Stores, over th…

This is a revised and enlarged edition of John Moriarty’s first published work, which has been out of print since 1994. A Book of Revelations mediated by stories and personal excursions in literature, philosophy and sacred writing…

What if the answers to our housing crisis weren’t locked in government policy or developer margins —but already being built, quietly, by communities across the world? In Our Homes, eco-builder and broadcaster Harrison Gardner expl…

Featuring 100 captivating portraits of many of Ireland’s greatest contemporary writers, alongside conversations with each on their writing life, Scribendi is a landmark book of portraits of Irish writers by internationally renowne…

The story of the grassroots #WakingTheFeminists movement in Irish theater, a campaign that changed how we saw the world and reshaped the future both on and off the stage. When the Abbey Theatre's 2016 centenary program excluded wo…

You could say that Frank McNally is a travel writer – he writes while the world travels by! For almost twenty years, Frank’s name has occupied the byline of the ever-present and perennially entertaining 'Irishman&rsquo…

Across artificial intelligence, climate change, food safety, transport and communication, the fields of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) are integral to modern society. Through a selection of 46 lives from t…

The Book of Chad or the Gospel of Teilo is the earliest extant Welsh version of the Latin Gospels. This is a reprint of Hopkins-James' transcription of the manuscript of 1934, with a critique, a history of the text, its charcteris…

Keane's subject is the fruitful tension between tradition and the poet's indivual talent, his legacy as it is made new in particular poems. In examining the poetry of William Butler Yeats, Keane traces literary, philosophic, and s…

Haunted English explores the role of language in colonization and decolonization by examining how Anglo-Celtic modernists W. B. Yeats, Hugh MacDiarmid, and Marianne Moore "de-Anglicize" their literary vernaculars.Laura O'Connor de…

In Scandal Work: James Joyce, the New Journalism, and the Home Rule Newspaper Wars, Margot Gayle Backus charts the rise of the newspaper sex scandal across the fin de siècle British archipelago and explores its impact on the work …

'The Essential George Boole: Logic, Love and Legacy' is a captivating portrait of a brilliant mind and the family that shaped him. George Boole, a largely self-taught genius, as a youth mastered multiple languages and scientific d…

How far would you go for the missing?Blending private and public history, cultural analysis, family memoir, and autobiography, Clair Wills explores profound questions about memory, loss, motherhood, and emigration. She traces a hi…