Irish Books

Christopher Murray

Each episode focuses on a single book to offer in-depth exploration of contemporary Irish writing, one of the the dominant presences in book shops, book groups, and writers’ festivals around the world. Guest experts on Irish culture join author and critic Chris Murray to explore the techniques, cultural resonances, and deeper meanings of the nation’s recent literature. Irish Books tackles prize winners and some of the biggest names in Irish writing today while also calling attention to emerging voices that deserve notice. Listeners will learn more about the books they loved and find out what they should read next.

Host @drchrismurray.bsky.social (Bluesky)

Read the blog at https://irishbookspodcast.blogspot.com

The Irish Books Podcast is produced by East Coast Studio with support from the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Monash University

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11 episodes
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S1 · E10
June 17 · 47 min
Connections Severed and Retied: Colum McCann's Twist
Killian Quigley, an expert in oceanic humanities, is Chris's guest to discuss McCann's deep-sea adventure. Writer Anthony Fennell joins a vessel that repairs the information cables that run deep under the ocean, hoping for material for an article. Yet Fennell finds himself especially drawn to his fellow-Irishman, the expedition leader John Conway, both in thrall to and resentful of his corporate employers. Through Conway, Fennell understands the complexities of the undersea network: the cables are imperilled by climate change, yet also strike the alienated Fennell as symbolic of human connections, from family bonds to larger questions of social cohesion prompted by racial tensions. As Chris and Killian discuss, McCann is drawn to both literal and representative meanings of the data cables and the task of mending them. While the novel draws on such literary influences as Samuel Beckett, Joseph Conrad, and Jules Verne, the enigmatic Conway is a Gatsby figure who mystifies our narrator. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
S1 · E9
June 3 · 39 min
Tragic Balladry in the Wild West: Kevin Barry's The Heart in Winter
Maebh Long - Kevin Barry fan and Eamon Cleary Chair of Irish Studies at the University of Otago - joins Chris to discuss The Heart in Winter. Barry's tale of lovers on the run is set in the American midwest in 1891 but looks back to Irish folkloric figures like Deirdre of the Sorrows. As Chris and Maebh discuss, Barry gives us a more agentive figure than the folkloric models in Polly Gillespie, the more streetwise character. If this makes Polly more modern, and even feminist, than the old Irish stories, the novel also looks to our own time in its language: Barry puts twenty-first century speech in his characters' mouths rather than the language of 1891. The Heart in Winter is a deceptive novel: it has a straightforward plot but a rich texture, and an exploration of melancholic desire that is also playful in the tradition of Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, and Flann O’Brien. Read the accompanying blog post at https://irishbookspodcast.blogspot.com/2026/06/dark-balladry-in-wild-west-kevin-barrys.html See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
S1 · E8
May 20 · 55 min
Is the Sky Blue? Anna Burns's Milkman
This remarkable novel presents us with a speaker who is reluctant to tell her story. Our young narrator's crisis begins when a republican paramilitary known as the Milkman begins to pay her unwanted attention. Milkman's courtship resembles guerrilla warfare, and his unexplained attraction to Middle Sister befits the directionlessness of the IRA campaign in the late 1970s. Chris and guest Professor James Chandler (University of Chicago) navigate a book made complex by the narrator's reluctance to share: Middle Sister has been traumatised, and she reveals information in oblique ways. We piece together the story from the words of an evasive and digressive speaker who is mindful not only of direct recrimination from paramilitaries for any wrong decisions, but the danger of local gossip. If the scenario is terrifying, nonetheless Burns achieves a quirky humour in the unconventional storytelling mode and, in a subtle way, she poses probing questions about ideology. For various reasons, Milkman is a difficult book, on which many readers give up: Chris and Jim urge them to stick with it. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
S1 · E7
May 6 · 59 min
Cracked Lens over a Cold Case: Sebastian Barry's Old God's Time
Kevin Foster, an expert in war narratives at Monash University, helps Chris examine a quirky veteran: the hero of Old God's Time fought in the Malayan Emergency and is a retired Garda. He was also brought up in a Christian Brothers home: protagonist Tom Kettle has been through the wars, so to speak. Tom's past resurfaces when two policemen visit his home in Dalkey about a cold case, little realising how closely the mystery relates to Tom's personal tragedies. His attempts to start again seem never to have succeeded; his life has been a series of devastating losses with only glimpses of contentment. Old memories intrude upon Tom's present so forcibly that we wonder whether he has dementia. The book is also haunted, in an inter-textual way, by ghosts from Sebastian Barry's other novels. Kevin and Chris find Old God's Time a moving and complex book which also achieves an unlikely humour in its vision of Tom Kettle's eccentric and perhaps disintegrating mind. The novel moves gracefully between different registers, invoking Greek myth with pathos at one moment and conventions of crime fiction at another. Contains spoilers. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
S1 · E6
April 22 · 54 min
Placing the Pieces of Grief and Love: Sally Rooney's Intermezzo
Chris's guest to discuss Intermezzo is Madeleine Callaghan (Maddy), Senior Lecturer in the School of English at the University of Sheffield. Maddy explains that Rooney's title alludes to the opening strategies of chess, in which players aim to set up the conditions they want for free play. But Rooney's characters find they can't arrange their lives the same way: they can neither identify the beginning nor put the pieces where they want. We meet Peter - torn between his sexual ideal in the younger Naomi and his Platonic match in old flame Sylvia - and Peter's student brother Ivan, the socially awkward chess champion who falls for the much older Margaret. Chris points out that the brothers have recently been bereaved by the loss of their father, a grief that is present without being mediated. With that bereavement, and troubled love affairs, the novel presents a lonely world in which emotional closeness is elusive, sex doesn't fully answer a person's needs, and the unfortunate dog symbolises neglected responsibilities. While commentators have made much of Rooney as millennial spokesperson, Maddy notes Intermezzo's place in the cerebral traditions of various European fictions. Rooney is also specifically interested in where modern Ireland is going, without perhaps having the answers. It feels like a moral work, but does it communicate worthwhile morals? And would the novel benefit from the ability to find humour in adverse circumstances, as in some of the most well-known Irish literature? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
S1 · E5
April 8 · 47 min
Excavating the Hidden Self: Adrian Duncan's The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth
Lucy Collins of University College Dublin explains that Duncan refuses what we expect of a novel. The ideas of visual art matter more here than the plot and character that usually drive fiction. Our focus is on the restorative sculptor John Molloy, and the narrative takes us into his craft. While Chris finds Molloy a frustratingly repressed character, a crisis forces Molloy to confront his past. His interest in sculpture recalls both his father's accident at the local quarry and his mother's vision of a Blessed Virgin statue moving. Molloy remains unemotional despite establishing a relationship with fellow-artist Bernadette, but the imminent death of a friend compels him to grieve. Lucy and Chris discuss how Molloy's day among the artworks of Bologna, minutely observed, offers means for Molloy to engage with old trauma and new bereavement. In all of this author Adrian Duncan avoids obvious literary techniques so that the reader must encounter Molloy on his own terms as an artist. LINKS: Irish Books Podcast on Blogspot: https://irishbookspodcast.blogspot.com Follow the Irish Books Podcast channel on WhatsApp https://serpentstail.com/work/the-gorgeous-inertia-of-the-earth/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
S1 · E4
March 25 · 47 min
Back from Brooklyn: Colm Tóibín's Long Island
25 years after the events of Brooklyn, Eilis Lacey has integrated to American life successfully, but faces a crisis in consequence of her husband's infidelity, a crisis that propels her home to Enniscorthy. Guest Matthew Ryan, a specialist in Modern Literature at the Australian Catholic University with an expertise in Tóibín's work, stresses that Eilis is a more assertive character than we meet in Brooklyn. But can we ever go home? Much has changed. Eilis attempts to revive old relationships, unaware of complications that have arisen in her absence, leading host Chris Murray to wonder whether the migrant character can treat multiple locations as fully real, or always treats one place as a dream. Yet the locals can be selfish too, with characters like the disappointed Jim Farrell and widowed Nancy Sheridan identifying each other as means to their own self-transformation. Small-town Ireland is a place in which characters feel watched, and Tóibín's cast agonises over whether their desires are respectable. For this reason, what is unsaid is vitally important in Tóibín's work, and his characters' paralysis looks back to writers like James Joyce: Chris and Matt ask whether Tóibín indicates an essentially Irish condition. Contains spoilers. LINKS: Irish Books Podcast on Blogspot: https://irishbookspodcast.blogspot.com Follow the Irish Books Podcast channel on WhatsApp https://colmtoibin.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
S1 · E3
March 11 · 35 min
Grime, Passion, and Addiction: Eimear McBride's The City Changes its Face
Dr Frances Devlin-Glass, Director of the annual James Joyce celebration Bloomsday Melbourne, sees Joyce's Modernism at work in McBride's novel. Chris and Frances find McBride having fun with language, the written sentence, and even typesetting at the same time as she explores the complex relations between recovering addict Stephen, his much younger partner Eily, and Stephen's daughter Grace. Chris and Frances discuss formal experimentation too: the plot centres on Stephen screening an autobiographical film. McBride embeds the screenplay in The City Changes its Face alongside studies of the characters' reactions. Through the fuss over the film, and the reunion with Grace, the sexually assertive Eily becomes jealous over Stephen. McBride invokes her range of inventiveness to portray Eily's anguish. But would a fan of Molly Bloom want Eily to be a stronger feminist? LINKS: Irish Books Podcast on Blogspot: https://irishbookspodcast.blogspot.com Follow the Irish Books Podcast channel on WhatsApp The Irish Books Podcast is proudly produced by East Coast Studio with support from the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Monash University See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
S1 · E2
February 25 · 42 min
Losing All Life's Certainties: Paul Lynch's Prophet Song
Lynch’s Booker-winner is divisive. While Chris Murray wonders whether the characters in Prophet Song could be fleshed out, and the story of a fascist Ireland more fully realised, his guest says that this misses the point. Professor Christopher Morash (Trinity College Dublin) argues that Lynch’s purpose is to explore what happens to a person whose identity is gradually eroded. In a vividly portrayed suburban Dublin that steadily slips from view, narrator Eilish Stack first loses her husband, then her profession and her home, and faces the prospect of losing her children too. Morash says that Lynch is most interested in this reduction of a person to her basic impulse to survive, and that the story of Ireland’s decline into an authoritarian state is only a device to achieve this. While recent politics have made Prophet Song topical, Morash suggests that paying too much attention to the book’s political dimension means misreading Lynch’s experiment in ‘radical empathy’. Morash refers to playwright Sean O’Casey to show the Irish literary tradition at work in Prophet Song, in which civil war is so mutually harmful that the specific politics cease to matter. Murray wonders whether the book is too bleak, but Morash says that the closing image of the sea signals hope. Which perspective on Prophet Song seems right to you? LINKS: Irish Books Podcast on Blogspot: https://irishbookspodcast.blogspot.com Follow the Irish Books Podcast channel on WhatsApp Buy Prophet Song: https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/prophet-song-9780861545896 Guest: Christopher Morash http://www.tcd.ie/English/staff/academic-staff/chris-morash.php The Irish Books Podcast is proudly produced by East Coast Studio with support from the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Monash University See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
S1 · E1
February 11 · 39 min
Disaster on Rails: Emma Donoghue’s Paris Express
In this episode of Irish Books, historian Professor Dianne Hall joins Chris Murray to discuss Emma Donoghue’s The Paris Express, a book that brings aspects of the thriller genre to literary fiction. Set aboard a train on a single day in 1895, The Paris Express assembles a cast of real figures, but in an alternate history in which they are propelled towards disaster. At the heart of the story is the tension between the young anarchist Mado Pelletier, who carries a bomb, and the only passenger who guesses her secret, the librarian and charity-worker Blonska. Chris and Dianne explore Donoghue’s blend of historical research and imaginative reinvention, the novel’s queer aesthetic, and how the threat of impending destruction speaks to the sense of fragility in our own time. . Dianne Hall is Professor of History at Victoria University, Melbourne. LINKS: Irish Books Podcast on Blogspot: https://irishbookspodcast.blogspot.com Buy "Paris Express" https://www.panmacmillan.com.au/9781035057276/ Follow the Irish Books Podcast channel on WhatsApp Guest: Dianne Hall https://researchers.vu.edu.au/2149-dianne-hall The Irish Books Podcast is proudly produced by East Coast Studio with support from the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Monash University See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Nov 14, 2025 · 2 min
Irish Books Season 1
Hear in-depth discussions of recent Irish books that are worth reading, across a range of genres. Expert guests get to the heart of books you know and give you ideas of what contemporary Irish literature to read next. In Irish Books, author and critic Chris Murray discusses recent Irish books with expert guests. Hear their in-depth conversations to learn about contemporary Irish books that are worth reading. For lovers of Irish fiction, The Irish Books Podcast gets to the heart of books you know and gives you ideas of what to read next. Follow the Irish Books Podcast channel on WhatsApp See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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