The year 2021 was a year in which partition once again became intensely political. Current politicians have described it as a ‘tragedy’ and a ‘stain on the nation’, but have we thought about why it happened, and what the alternatives would have been?

There were many books on the Border but Charles Townshend’s The Partition: Ireland Divided, 1885-1925 (Allen Lane, €35) shines through to provide a more nuanced interpretation on how it happened and its deep roots. Townshend shows how Ulster differed from the rest of Ireland, and how it was regarded as vaguely foreign by nationalist politicians who supported an Irish-Ireland cause. In fact, Ulster unionists were only much later converted to partition as a solution. This book shows that nationalists frequently misunderstood the North — a contemporary problem as well.

Susan McKay’s Northern Protestants: On Shifting Ground (Blackstaff Press, €19.99) is a travelogue of the views of some of that ‘tribe’. While there may be questions about how typical those whom she selected are, they come across as a distinct people.

Malachi O’Doherty’s The Year of Chaos (Atlantic Books, €28), part memoir, part history, looks at the North in 1971-72, in the bloodiest 12 months of the Troubles, and its impact politically. He gives an insight into the choices young men had at the time. O’Doherty chose peace, others didn’t. 

Lea Ypi’s memoir Free (Allen Lane, €28) is a coming-of-age story in Albania that interweaves her growing up with the small Stalinist state’s collapse.

It is beautifully written, funny and moving, but also tells us something about all the preconceived ‘truths’ we inherit with our nationhood, religion, family and ideology.

Richard Chambers’s A State of Emergency (HarperCollins, €13.99) looks at how the Irish State dealt with Covid. A lot we already know, but what makes this book worth the price are the insider stories of rivalries, fights and personality clashes. Government policy is revealed to be a bit like Bismarck’s sausage, not pretty in the making.

Covid is bound to affect us long after the virus ceases to be a part of our daily lives. What those effects will be is a matter for speculation, but Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order by Thomas Wright and Colin Kahl (St Martin’s Press, €20.25) gives a good early stab at this for international politics. What could have united the world, seems to have had the opposite effect, and they see it deepening the China/ US divide.

How states deal with Covid and its aftermaths will be determined by its political leaders. Anthony Seldon asks whether the job of political leader has become too big for anyone. The Impossible Office (Cambridge, €27.99) studies the British prime minister in great detail, coming to some stark conclusions, not least about the current incumbent of Downing Street.

Haughey, by my colleague Gary Murphy (Gill Books, €27.99), is based on exclusive access to Charles Haughey’s personal papers, and full co-operation from his family and friends. This substantial biography of one of the most interesting political leaders of late 20th century Ireland tells Haughey’s story from his own perspective. Murphy’s book offers a welcome counterbalance to most other assessments, which tend towards villainography. An essential read. 

Eoin O’Malley is associate professor of politics at Dublin City University

Art and Design

Mary O’Sullivan

The must-have for the fashionista this Christmas is Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture by Justine Picardie (Faber, €35). Picardie, who also wrote the acclaimed Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life brings the same clarity, rigour and empathy to the hitherto unknown life story of Christian Dior’s beloved sister who worked for the French Resistance before being captured by the Nazis and sent to the concentration camps.

Catherine rarely mentioned her ordeal so Picardie uses the memoirs written by her peers, government papers and the Dior archives to bring her traumatic experience to life.

Equally compelling but in a totally different vein is the book for design lovers — Terence: The Man Who Invented Design, written by Stephen Bayley and Roger Mavity (Little Brown, €35). The Terence of the title is, of course, Sir Terence Conran who revolutionised Britain’s homes with his Habitat stores, and their taste in food with his many restaurants.

The authors, who worked with Conran, chart the twists and turns of his career and his marriages and what emerges — in a gossipy, entertaining book — is a complex character who could be charismatic and inspirational, mean-spirited and yet always larger than life.

Simon Watson is a wonderful Irish photographer whose work is acclaimed worldwide. Interiors are something of a speciality with him and with the newly formed publishing house Dürer Editions he has just published Portrait of a House, (Dürer Editions €45) an evocative exploration over several years of an 18th century house on Dublin’s Henrietta Street.

Any art lover would be thrilled to receive a copy of Dark Beauty: Hidden Detail in Harry Clarke’s Stained Glass by Lucy Costigan and Michael Cullen (Merrion Press, €27.95), a beautifully produced book with 300 magnificent images of his work.

Harry Clarke’s stained glass windows are a part of our heritage which has been largely forgotten, possibly because most of his windows are in churches, now less frequented than ever before, so with Dark Beauty the authors do the nation a real service by casting a spotlight on his talent, his genius for colour and the extraordinary characters he created for his works.

In 2019 photographer Paul Kelly’s published Return to Sender, in which he took a selection of John Hinde postcards that always showed Ireland as a happy sunny place and matched them with his own photos of the same locations. His follow up In Hinde Sight - Postcards from Ireland Past (Gill Books, €19.99) is equally good and ideal for the present climate because as John Hinde said, “we need to be uplifted rather than depressed.”

There are those who say a book is the ideal gift because there are no calories in it, but beware Soup Broth Bread by Rachel Allen (Michael Joseph, €14); the photos are so appetising and the recipes so simply explained, you will find yourself trying many of her creations. And the lovely thing is, as well as many of the old Irish favourites, Allen gives us a melting pot of multicultural flavours.

Literary Fiction

Estelle Birdy
In Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (Faber, €9.99) an ordinary family man faces a huge ethical dilemma in recession-hit Wexford in the winter of 1985. Church, State and family all play a part in this compelling, beautifully written novel.

Luckenbooth (Cornerstone, €12.59) is Jenni Fagan’s fabulist tale of the comings and goings in an Edinburgh tenement during the 20th century. A Gothic story of lovers, haters, horned women, winged ghosts and all kinds of beautiful oddballs.

Two short story collections stand out. Louise Kennedy’s debut The End of the World is a Cul de Sac (Bloomsbury, €14.99) is sublime. Her stories of the challenges of marriage, family, finances and the scars left by violence are warm, haunting and funny. Deirdre Sullivan’s gem I Want to Know That I Will Be Okay (Banshee Press, €12.99) focuses on the female body in all its glory and horror. Amongst the haunted dolls and strange things growing in bodies and minds, there’s a depth of understanding of what it means to be female. What Willow Says (Epoque Press, €9.99), Lynn Buckle’s portrait of the relationship between a youthful grandmother and her deaf granddaughter as they survey the natural world around them in boggiest Kildare is a touching study of love, nature and loss.

Animal (Bloomsbury, €18.99), Lisa Taddeo’s fiction debut deserves a place here, not because it is perfect — although the writing is incredibly stylish — but because the narrator Joan is one of most interesting female characters ever written. A woman entirely attuned to sex and its power, she is unflinching, ever observant.

White City (Simon & Schuster, €15.99) Kevin Power’s second novel is as exciting as it is well-observed. In post-recession Dublin and recovering-from-war Belgrade, the adult son of a disgraced financier suffers a breakdown after being involved in a get-rich-quick scheme. The plot is pacy, the dialogue sharp and funny and the characters wholly real. In Crossroads (4th Estate, €13.99) Jonathan Franzen returns to his obsession — the mid-Western family saga. Set in 1970s Illinois, with all its creeping post-Summer of Love disappointment, it starts a trilogy following the eclectic Hildebrant family. A touching read that holds the reader’s attention across 600 pages.

Estelle Birdy is a writer, poet and critic. Her debut novel ‘Ravelling’ is due from Lilliput Press in 2023

Poetry

Paul Perry
Charles Simic once defined poetry as “three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley”. And this last year has felt like one dark alley, but poetry, like no other art form, has, to invoke the late great Seamus Heaney, “set the darkness echoing”.

War of the Beasts and the Animals by the Russian poet and writer Maria Stepanova (Bloodaxe Books, €14.50) is skilfully translated by Sasha Dugdale, or rather ‘triangulated’ in Dugdale’s words, and at its heart has Dashevsky’s concept of the existence of ‘a poem’s pre-textual body’. Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory is a prizewinning novel, and this selection of her poetry, a first in English, is entrancing in its syncopated rhythms, and intertextual playfulness. Take this from the title poem, ‘this little piggy went to the market/and this little piggy froze to death/and the landowner put a gun to his head/and a black car came for the officer.’

Other firsts closer to home include Auguries of a Minor God, Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe’s stunning debut (Faber, €13); a collection which is ambitious, playful, and rich in its cultural and linguistic tapestries. Here is a poet with a vision of poetry as a healing art. Eamon McGuinness’s The Wrong Heroes (Salmon Poetry, €12) is another impressive first book by a writer with a deft feel for the vulnerabilities of contemporary life. And then there’s the mesmerising Eat or We Both Starve (Carcanet Press, €13) by Victoria Kennefick, a miracle of a book; brave, political and telling.

“The worst illiterate is the political illiterate”, Brecht once wrote, and in Annemarie Ní Churreáin’s fierce second collection The Poison Glen (The Gallery Press, €12.95), we have a poet who is not afraid to address the political legacy of Irish church and State malfeasance especially with respect to the care of women and children. “Who am I lost to?” Ní Churreáin’s writes poignantly in ‘Fagan’s Eagles’, and in ‘The Screaming Room’, there are these powerful words, “I come from women who found themselves/in trouble, who turned to their pale reflections/and asked What can I do? What can I do?’/All that fire, all that burning. In their honour/I can never be silent again.”

A rich year for poetry which speaks, as passionately as any other art form, truth to power.

Paul Perry is a poet and novelist. He directs the Creative Writing programme at UCD

Fiction

Anne Marie Scanlon 
It’s become a truism that we live in times too strange and ridiculous for satire. Somebody should have told John Boyne. The Echo Chamber (Doubleday, €13.99) is a brilliant parody of virtue-signalling, social media saints, and cancellations. Boyne takes no prisoners with his skewering of those who exhaust themselves trying to look as if they’re doing something good. I choked laughing.

Ross O’Carroll Kelly has been holding a mirror up to Irish society for two decades and in Normal Sheeple (Sandycove, €9.80) his father CO’CK is the (Trumpian) Taoiseach. Sorcha is now a minister and hopes to outlaw cattle and sheep farming to stop global warming. Ross is as laugh-out-loud funny as ever, but age is catching up with him. In the entire book he only cheats on Sorcha once and manages not to kill any animals despite the streets of Dublin being overrun with cows, sheep, and angry farmers.

Aisling, created by authors Emer McLysaght and Sarah Breen, has also become a staple of Irish life. In book four, Aisling and the City (Gill Books, €11.99), our girl takes a swish job in New York. I took the same journey in my mid-20s, and Aisling’s New York is (mostly) spot on. (The ‘Irish Mafia’ were called the ‘Murphia’ in my day.) Aisling is a nice, sensible girl but she is gut-bustingly hilarious. I may not be the target audience for her antics, but I adore her. Be warned, it ends on some cliff-hanger.

From the young to the old. Richard Osman’s four elderly detectives are back in The Man Who Died Twice (Viking, €8.99), the sequel to the hugely successful The Thursday Murder Club and are as entertaining as ever. The formidable Elizabeth receives a letter from a dead man and before you know it, the fearsome foursome are involved with dodgy diamonds, the Mafia, MI6 and most terrifyingly, local thugs. Osman’s wit, charm and kindness are ingrained in every page.

Liane Moriarty’s Apples Never Fall (Michael Joseph, €28) also features elderly people and the difficulties they face retiring after a very active and busy life. I am a huge fan of Liane Moriarty who with every book outdoes herself and this is her best yet. I could write a thesis on the many layers there are to this novel. There is not a word wasted, everything — no matter how casual or throwaway — counts. I could not put it down.

Anne Marie Scanlon is a journalist and author

Celebrity Memoir

Dónal Lynch
As an aficionado of celebrity memoirs, I will grudgingly acknowledge that one of the horrors of modern publishing is the proliferation of celebrity memoirs. A big name can shift copies fasters than a talented new author, and is thus a safer bet, but the writing can be lazy — or in Billie Eilish’s case, there might be almost no writing at all; she brought out a photo book this year. Now and again, however, a celebrity author bucks the stocking-filler trend and produces something genuinely worth reading.

Top of the list this year is undoubtedly Sinéad O’Connor’s Rememberings (Sandycove, €18.99), in which the singer tells the story of her early life and rise to worldwide fame in evocative and moving prose. So many people had told Sinéad’s story before but it is fascinating to read it in her own words and the book was, deservedly, a New York Times bestseller.

The other must-read musical memoir of the year comes from another of the most compelling female vocalists of the last few decades: Tracey Thorn. Her book My Rock ‘n’ Roll Friend (Canongate, €16.99) recounts the friendship, with Lindy Morrison of the cult Australian band the Go-Betweens, which shaped Thorn’s life and music in a world that was largely dominated by men. As with Sinéad’s book, the Everything But The Girl singer’s writing shines with wit and philosophical insight and is a worthy follow-up to her bestselling Bedsit Disco Queen.

The stars of the film world have also produced their fair share of compelling memoirs in 2021. Sharon Stone’s The Beauty of Living Twice (Atlantic Books, €18) recounts her efforts to rebuild her life and career after a massive stroke in 2001 almost cost her both. My Body by Emily Ratajkowski (Quercus, €16.99) takes a subject that has obsessed tabloid media for years – the model/actress body – and uses it as a jumping-off point for a series of memoir-essays on the objectification of female beauty in which she details the exploitation and abuse that she endured. Yearbook (Crown, €28) by Seth Rogan is a lighter read. In a series of essays, the Canadian star of Superbad and Knocked Up looks back at his youthful misadventures and his rise to become one of the biggest comedy stars of the noughties. It’s full of gossipy asides about his Hollywood brethren, including Tom Cruise, Nicholas Cage and Kanye West and gives an insider account of how his movie, The Insider, was almost scuppered by North Korean hackers.

Will Smith’s memoir, Will (Penguin Press, €28) blends slightly corporate self-help truisms with bracing honesty about his tough early life and is infused with a sly cynicism about the promotional bandwagons he periodically has to step on.

Stanley Tucci went viral in lockdown when his wife filmed him making a Negroni and he channels his love of food and drink into Taste: My Life Through Food (Fig Tree, €20) which is part culinary travelogue and part memoir — it also deals with the period in 2017 when he underwent chemotherapy for a mouth tumour.

Lastly, Joan Collins’ My Unapologetic Diaries (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, €14.99) dishes as much dirt, and throws as many of her fellow stars under the bus, as one could ever hope.

Dónal Lynch is a journalist and critic

Thrillers

Eilis O’Hanlon
One of the more welcome recent developments in crime fiction is a return to the gentler pleasures of the traditional detective story.

Among the best examples this year was Janice Hallett’s debut The Appeal (Viper, €12.60). Someone has been sent to jail for murder, but Roderick Tanner QC suspects they may be innocent, and assigns two students to re-investigate the case. The reader is not told at the start who died, or how, or even who is in prison. What makes the novel so different is that it’s told entirely through emails, texts, and legal documents. For once, the hype was entirely justified.

True Crime Story (Doubleday, €18.20) is also told non-conventionally. A 19-year-old student walks out of a party and is never seen again. The author, Joseph Knox, making an appearance in his own book, is contacted some years later by a casual friend who’s investigating what really happened. When she too disappears, he takes up the case. Cleverly playing on the popularity of cold case documentaries, the story is written as if it is indeed, as the title says, a true crime story, and is told mainly through a series of interviews with witnesses who, even now, “tended old grudges like garden plots”. The idea is that truth emerges not in the linear way of fiction, but in fragments and threads.

When a writer has been publishing novels for more than 30 years, they can become jaded, even cynical. Yet here is Val McDermid in 1979 (Little, Brown, €14.99) starting a new series with all the verve of a newcomer. Allie Burns is a rookie reporter looking to break her first big story by infiltrating a terrorist group in Glasgow. What could possibly go wrong? The novel is filled with authentic period detail from a decade for which McDermid, herself a journalist at the time, clearly holds huge affection. You could even smoke in the newsroom. Those were the days.

The Passenger (Pushkin Press, €12.59) follows businessman Otto Silberman, forced to go on the run when Nazi stormtroopers come to his door on Kristallnacht. The novel was actually written by its 23-year-old Jewish author, Ulrich Boschwitz, in 1938, as he too was fleeing the country. He died tragically just four years later when the ship on which he was travelling was hit by a U-boat. This rediscovered classic fizzes with frantic fear and energy.

Eilis O’Hanlon is a journalist and author

Sport

John Greene 
A bit like the bus, you wait ages for a good rugby book and then two come along at once.

At 34, Keith Earls is in the twilight of a glittering, trophy-laden career with Munster and Ireland, but the opening inscription in Fight or Flight: My Life, My Choices (Reach Sport, €19.99) hints that all was not as it seemed: “This book is dedicated to all the people in life who struggle to believe in themselves.”

Written with Tommy Conlon, Earls opens up with disarming honesty about his mental health issues and how a kid from ‘the wrong side of the tracks’ made it in a sport more associated with private schools.

He says he feels a responsibility to explain the impact of branding, “how it can affect your confidence, your wellbeing, your self-esteem, your whole future, actually”. One teacher told him he would never amount to anything. He was just 13.

Willie Anderson had his battles too. The opening sequence of his autobiography is memorable — recalling his dark days in an Argentinian prison after a prank went badly wrong during a rugby tour. Crossing the Line (Reach Sport, €19.99), written with Brendan Fanning, sees Anderson — a man who presented on the rugby field as a fearless warrior — reveal the vulnerabilities and doubts which lay beneath one of the game’s real hard men.

Earls and Conlon recently won the sports book of the year.

The other shortlisted titles were: Anderson’s and Devotion: A Memoir, a collaboration by Mickey Harte and author Brendan Coffey (Harper Collins Ireland, €21.99); Dark Blue by former Dublin footballer Shane Carthy (O’Brien Press, €15); The Nation Holds its Breath by broadcaster George Hamilton (Merrion Press, €22.95); and Unbroken, the memoir of former Kerry star Aidan O’Mahony with Michael Moynihan (Hachette Books, €14.99).

A couple of GAA books which might make ideal gifts are Grassroots, a rich collection of stories collected by PJ Cunningham (Ballpoint Press, €20) and a 50th anniversary history of the All-Stars by sisters Moira and Eileen Dunne, whose legendary father Mick was one of the founders — All-Star Gazing (Dunne Publishing, €25).

Outside of the Irish publishing landscape, another rugby book of note is This is Your Everest (Polaris Publishing, €24.30) by Tom English and Peter Burns, which tells the story of the Lions 1997 tour of South Africa, while Damage (Hamilcar Publications, €30.80) by Tris Dixon investigates the harsh truths behind the problem of brain injuries in boxing.

John Greene is the sports editor of the Sunday Independent  

  

Nature

Hilary White
Diversity — of voice, focus, and backdrop — is the motto in The Wild Isles (Head of Zeus, €28.99), a dazzling anthology of Irish and British nature writing. Edited by Patrick Barkham, it takes in seminal staples (Gilbert White, John Clare, Dorothy Wordsworth) and modern masters (Kathleen Jamie, Helen Macdonald, Wainwright-winner James Rebanks). Peig Sayers, John Moriarty, Tim Robinson, and Sara Baume are part of a strong Irish showing.

The year’s other great anthology was Women on Nature (Unbound, €28.99), a tribute to female nature writers through history right up to today’s explosion in the genre. Homegrown heroes Sinéad Gleeson, Jessica Traynor, and Bláthnaid McAnulty (sister of Dara) feature.

All nature writing has a duty to the environment, and part of that role is to stir wonder. Take A World on the Wing (Picador, €21.99), an astounding chronicle of bird migration from the Pulitzer-nominated Scott Weidensaul. If his account of Arctic godwits flying 12,000km across the Pacific to New Zealand in eight days doesn’t blow your mind then I don’t know what to do for you.

The New Yorker was one of the first major publications to take the science and implications of climate change seriously. The Fragile Earth (William Collins, €20.99) is a collection of its best writing on the subject over 30 years.

Islands of Abandonment (William Collins, €18.99), Cal Flyn’s exploration of post-human landscapes, is an incredible melding of melancholy and hope, and a non-fiction highlight of 2021.

Closer to home, Conor W. O’Brien follows his Irish Book Awards-nominated Ireland Through Birds with Life In Ireland (Merrion Press, €15.99), telling the billion-year history of our land in a digestible format. As an island nation, every home needs a copy of The Coastal Atlas of Ireland (Cork University Press, €55). a powerhouse celebration of our coastline and a winner at this year’s An Post Irish Book Awards.

Two homegrown nature-writing titles set themselves by the water and discovered both intimacy and broad horizons there. Declan Murphy’s The Spirit of the River (Lilliput, €17.99), sees a quest for kingfishers in Wicklow open a door to much else, while Returning Light (HarperCollins Ireland, €13.99) takes us out to Skellig Michael where Robert L. Harris charts 30 years as warden of that otherworldly ocean peak.

Hilary White is a journalist and writer