Bibliofemme Bookclub An Irish Bookclub

The writer came to stay before Christmas and bereft of good reading material I asked her for some recommendations. The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe was top of the list she tapped into a note on my iPhone and was the first of her recommendations that I purchased.

First published in 1958 the book is enjoying a second life thanks to the TV show Mad

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First Love, Last Rites is Ian McEwan’s first collection of short stories; it won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976.

McEwan’s characters are a strange lot; a man who ‘disappears’ his wife, a paedophile, a rapist, orphans and an infantilised man. What is stranger, however, is that any shock value one could attribute to the choosing

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Jennifer Johnston is a great storyteller, that much is true. I’m told graduates of the Irish secondary school system are likely to have encountered her coming-of-age novel Shadows on Our Skin, which was Booker Prize listed in 1977, but I had never come across her work until I read and thoroughly enjoyed This is not a Novel in 2002. I was quietly

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I was fortunate enough to read Gilead by Marilynne Robinson this year. Blown away by her brilliance, I then set out to read Housekeeping – the only other work of fiction Robinson has written.

Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly. First they are under the care of their competent grandmother

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This delicious book is a witty comedy of contemporary manners, as well as a charming homage to the art of novel-writing. Brought together by a shared love of Jane Austen, five women and one man meet monthly to discuss her six novels. As the six characters go in search of the author – each has their own “private Austen” – they

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