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House of Splendid Isolation

Edna O'Brien · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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Annie Dunne

Sebastian Barry · 240 pages

IrelandElderly ProtagonistLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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A Line Made by Walking

Sara Baume · 321 pages

Retreating to her family's rural house in Ireland to escape the challenges of urban life, artist Frankie explores the chain of events that have challenged her mental stability and art education. As she picks up photography once more, she searches for meaning and healing while examining the natural world around her.

IrelandLiterary FictionAtmosphericCharacter-Driven
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The Heather Blazing

Colm Toibin · 256 pages

IrelandElderly ProtagonistLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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The Godforsaken Daughter

Christina McKenna · 378 pages

When Ruby Clare's father was alive, they toiled together happily on their dairy farm in Northern Ireland. Since his death, Ruby--thirty-three, plump but comely--has been forced indoors and made a domestic drudge for Martha, her endlessly critical mother, and her prettier younger sisters, May and June. But everything changes when Ruby finds her late grandmother's old case in the attic. Among its st

IrelandAtmosphericCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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That They May Face The Rising Sun

John McGahern · 314 pages

"Joe and Kate Ruttledge, have come to rural Ireland from London in search of a different life. In passages of beauty and truth, the drama of a year in their lives and those of the memorable characters that move about them unfolds through action, the rituals of work, religious observances and play. By the novel's close we feel that we have been introduced, with deceptive simplicity, to a complete r

IrelandAtmosphericLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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The Wonder

Emma Donoghue · 304 pages

Set in the Irish Midlands in the 1850s, Emma Donoghue's *The Wonder* - inspired by numerous European and North American cases of 'fasting girls' between the sixteenth century and the twentieth - is a psychological thriller about a child's murder threatening to happen in slow motion before our eyes. Pitting all the seductions of fundamentalism against sense and love, it is a searing examination

IrelandAtmosphericCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Dublinesque

Enrique Vila-Matas · 311 pages

Samuel Riba is about to turn 60. A successful publisher in Barcelona, he has published many of his generation's most important authors. But he is increasingly prone to attacks of anxiety - about the digital revolution and its threat to books and 'high culture', and about the fact that he has yet to discover in the younger generation a writer of 'genius'. One night he has a vivid dream that takes p

IrelandElderly ProtagonistLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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The Spinning Heart

Donal Ryan · 160 pages

In the aftermath of Ireland's financial collapse, dangerous tensions surface in an Irish town. The collapse of Pokey Burke's construction company and subsequent disappearance of its boss, leaving employees unpaid and a housing project half-finished, send ripples throughout the entire community. As violence flares, the locals - from Pokey's foreman Bobby, simmering as he waits for his father's deat

IrelandAtmosphericLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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La tierra de los abetos puntiagudos

Sarah Orne Jewett · 168 pages

Elderly ProtagonistAtmosphericLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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Gun Street Girl

Adrian McKinty · 313 pages

"Belfast, 1985, amidst the "Troubles": Detective Sean Duffy, a Catholic cop in the Protestant RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary), struggles with burn-out as he investigates a brutal double murder and suicide. Did Michael Kelly really shoot his parents at point blank and then jump off a nearby cliff? A suicide note points to this conclusion, but Duffy suspects even more sinister circumstances. He soon

IrelandTerrorismAtmospheric
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The Night Swimmer

Matt Bondurant · 274 pages

A suspenseful novel about a young American couple--Elly and Fred--who win a pub on the southern most tip of Ireland and discover the body of an eccentric villager Elly knows floating in the sea. Was it a suicide?

IrelandAtmosphericLiterary FictionFemale Lead
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Orphan Train

Christina Baker Kline · 400 pages

Close to aging out of the foster care system, Molly Ayer takes a position helping an elderly woman named Vivian and discovers that they are more alike than different as she helps Vivian solve a mystery from her past. When 17-year-old Molly Ayer is sent to perform community service at elderly Vivian Daly's home in order to avoid juvenile hall, she discovers the two are very much alike, despite the

IrelandElderly ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Blind Assassin

Margaret Atwood · 638 pages

More than fifty years on, Iris Chase is remembering Laura's mysterious death. And so begins an extraordinary and compelling story of two sisters and their secrets. Set against a panoramic backdrop of twentieth-century history, The Blind Assassin is an epic tale of memory, intrigue and betrayal...

Elderly ProtagonistAtmosphericCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Last September

Elizabeth Bowen · 283 pages

"In 1920, at their country home in County Cork, Sir Richard Naylor and his wife, Lady Myra, and their friends maintain a skeptical attitude toward the events going on around them, but behind the facade of tennis parties and army camp dances, all know that the end is approaching-- the end of British rule in the south of Ireland and, with it, the demise of a way of life that had survived for centuri

IrelandAtmosphericLiterary FictionFemale Lead
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Midwinter Break

Bernard MacLaverty · 242 pages

Gerry, once an architect, is forgetful and set in his ways. Stella is tired of his lifestyle, worried about their marriage, and angry at his constant undermining of her religious faith. Things are not helped by memories that have begun to resurface of a troubled time in their native Ireland. As their midwinter break comes to an end, we understand how far apart they are--and can only watch as they

IrelandElderly ProtagonistLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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The Weight of Ink

Rachel Kadish · 576 pages

Elderly ProtagonistAtmosphericLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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Let the Great World Spin

Colum McCann · 349 pages

In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann's stunningly in

IrelandTerrorismLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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Fire On The Mountain

Anita Desai · 145 pages

In this novel of India, Nadia Kaul's great-granddaughter is sent to spend the summer with her. Nadia is upset by having her routine disturbed but finds herself attempting to draw out and communicated with the strange and unfathomable girl who is strangely like herself.

Elderly ProtagonistAtmosphericLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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Foster

Claire Keegan · 108 pages

A small girl is sent to live with foster parents on a farm in rural Ireland, without knowing when she will return home. In the strangers' house she finds affection she has not known before, and slowly she begins to blossom in their care. But when a secret is suddenly revealed, she realizes how fragile her idyll is.

IrelandAtmosphericLiterary FictionFemale Lead
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The Keeper

Tana French · 528 pages

IrelandAtmosphericLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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Miss Garnet's Angel

Salley Vickers · 365 pages

Elderly ProtagonistAtmosphericLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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Love and Summer

William Trevor · 224 pages

It's summer and nothing much is happening in Rathmoye. So it doesn't go unnoticed when a dark-haired stranger appears on his bicycle and begins photographing the mourners at Mrs. Connulty's funeral. Florian Kilderry couldn't know that the Connultys are said to own half the town: he has only come to Rathmoye to photograph the scorched remains of its burnt- out cinema.A few miles out in the country,

IrelandLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenFemale Lead
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The All of It

Jeannette Haien · 145 pages

Relates the seemingly simple tale of a parishioner confiding in her priest, but the tangled confession brings secrets to light that provoke a moral quandary for not only the clergyman, but the reader as well. Set in a small town in Ireland, Haien's intimate novel of conversations and dilemmas-perfect for readers of Paul Harding's Tinkers, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, and Flannery O'Connor's Wise B

IrelandLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenFemale Lead
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Heroic Measures

Jill Ciment

From the author of The Tattoo Artist ("Beautifully written"--Alice Sebold; "Boldly conceived"--The New York Times Book Review), a new novel--taut, moving, accomplished--set in a fraught, post-9/11 New York... about real estate, dog love, and a city on alert. A gasoline tanker truck is "stuck" in the Midtown Tunnel. New Yorkers are panicked . . . . Is this the next big attack? Alex, an artist, and

TerrorismElderly ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction

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