Reading While Walking

Irish Literature

  • The Bee Sting (2023), by Paul Murray: A Review

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    6 min read

    Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting is one of those novels that you must sit with for a while. When I finished reading it, I wasn’t even absolutely sure whether I could say that I had liked it or not, or if it came down to those terms at all.

  • Intermezzo (2024), by Sally Rooney: A Review

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    13 min read

    Hailed as the literary event of the year, the publication of Intermezzo was preceded by a massive marketing campaign. It included the standard sending of advanced reader copies to online content creators and journalists as well as the publication of excerpts from the novel to build anticipation.

  • Wild Houses, by Colin Barrett review: Irish masculinities and the politics of non-violence

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    7 min read

    This review contains spoilers of Wild Houses.  To my mind, thirteen always seemed like a magic number of chapters for a novel or novella. I suppose that comes from reading The Picture of Dorian Gray at an early age and revisiting it again and again throughout my life, marvelling each time at Oscar Wilde’s mastery of…