1999 Booker Prize (shortlist) : The Blackwater Lightship
Colm Tóibín recommends
The Four Spent the Day Together (2025) Chris Kraus "This is a novel of the American moment by a writer whose antennae are attuned to subtle connections and strange cross-currents. Chris Kraus has a gift for making intimate things part of a pattern and for making that pattern a fresh and engaged way of dramatizing the way we live now."
The Emperor of Gladness (2025) Ocean Vuong "The Emperor of Gladness is a poetic, dramatic and vivid story. It has an epic sweep but it also handles intimacy and love with delicacy and deep originality. Its two main characters - the young Hai, so smart and troubled and ready for the world, and Grazina, who carries the weight of history as both burden and rare wisdom - are taken from the margins of American life by Ocean Vuong and, by dint of great sympathy and imaginative genius, placed at the very center of our world."
Small Rain (2024) Garth Greenwell "Small Rain is a marvelous novel: exceptionally vivid, real, and true. Garth Greenwell's sensibility is rich and generous-the narrator's memories are haunting, and his experiences of both illness and love are deeply affecting. You are in the room with him. This is a true achievement, written with engaged humanity and a great command of style."
Napalm in the Heart (2024) Pol Guasch "Pol Guasch creates an atmosphere that is menacing and powerfully dramatic, but he is also a poet who is interested in image and tone, in texture and rhythmic variation. This mixture gives his innovative and original novel a mesmeric force, wonderfully captured in this translation."
Whale Fall (2024) Elizabeth O'Connor "Whale Fall is a powerful novel, written with a calm, luminous precision, each feeling rendered with chiseled care, the drama of island life unfolding with piercing emotional accuracy"
Wild Houses (2024) Colin Barrett "Wild Houses has a rare momentum that comes from the rhythms of the sentences, the vivid descriptions and the brilliantly chosen details. The momentum emerges also from the depth and complexity of the main characters and the wide sweep of the narrative. In a small town in the west of Ireland over a few days, a whole world, memorable and edgy, is captured for the reader."
My Friends (2024) Hisham Matar "My Friends is a brilliant novel about innocence and experience, about friendship, family, and exile. It makes clear, once more, that Hisham Matar is a supremely talented novelist."
Day (2023) Michael Cunningham "In Day, Michael Cunningham displays his great gift for creating memorable characters, for noticing the world in all its oddness and beauty, for writing about love and loss in tones that are both unsparing and tender."
The Wren, the Wren (2023) Anne Enright "Anne Enright's style is as sharp and brilliant as Joan Didion's; the scope of her understanding is as wide as Alice Munro's; her vision of Ireland is as brave and original as Edna O'Brien."
The Future Future (2023) Adam Thirlwell "A book filled with imaginative leaps, brave decisions and tiny details that give delight."
Countries of Origin (2023) Javier Fuentes "Countries of Origin is a tender and heartfelt novel about homecoming in all its complexity and gay love in all its rawness and wonder. It paints a brilliant and evocative portrait of the city of Madrid as it slowly becomes a kind of home for our wandering hero."
The House of Doors (2023) Tan Twan Eng "The House of Doors is brilliantly observed and full of memorable characters. It is so well written, everything so effortlessly dramatized, the narrative so well structured and paced, that this is a book that will mesmerize readers far into the future."
The Gospel of Orla (2023) Eoghan Walls "The Gospel of Orla is written with immense control and precision so that the voice of the protagonist emerges as alive, individual and memorable. Eoghan Walls manages to make every single emotion Orla feels--every thought, response and action--utterly convincing and fresh and original."
Before All the World (2022) Moriel Rothman-Zecher "Before All the World is beautiful and original. It is also strange, arresting, high-risk. Very quickly this novel starts to work on the mind, making itself felt in complex and powerful and visionary ways, led by the rhythm in the language and the urge to make that language new."
Animal Person (2022) Alexander MacLeod "Alexander MacLeod's control of cadence and rhythm is so complete that it seems effortless."
Groundskeeping (2022) Lee Cole "Scrupulously perceptive . . . Groundskeeping is filled with close observation, detailed shading. It is an absorbing love story, but it is also an examination of class in America, and it captures with sharp insight a moment in recent history."
Free Love (2022) Tessa Hadley "Free Love is beautifully structured and brilliantly paced. It displays Tessa Hadley's extraordinary skill at making both surface life and deep interiors come fully alive. Phyllis Fischer's quest for love and escape is created with drama and excitement, but also with slow care and real delicacy and sympathy."
Small Things Like These (2021) Claire Keegan "In Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan creates scenes with astonishing clarity and lucidity. This is the story of what happened in Ireland, told with sympathy and emotional accuracy. From winter skies to the tiniest tick of speech to the baking of a Christmas cake, Claire Keegan makes her moments real—and then she makes them matter."
The Woman from Uruguay (2021) Pedro Mairal "The Woman from Uruguay is at once a picaresque comedy and a penetrating study of a man on the verge of middle age who is trying to deal with fatherhood, money, marriage and love. Lucas's vivid presence in this book is created by his rich way of observing the world. As he travels from Buenos Aires to Montevideo, over seventeen hours, a whole world comes into being, a complex sensibility gets dramatized."
A Passage North (2021) Anuk Arudpragasam "Written with scrupulous attention to nuance and detail, A Passage North captures the rich interior of its protagonist's mind but also contemporary Sri Lanka itself, war-scarred, traumatized. At its center is an exquisite form of noticing, a way of rendering consciousness and handling time that connects Arudpragasam to the great novelists of the past."
Barcelona Dreaming (2021) Rupert Thomson "The three stories in Barcelona Dreaming are connected by ingeniously created threads, but also by a tone that is ironic, observant, alert to the complexity of the characters’ motives and desires. The book is set in the modern city of Barcelona, its atmosphere invoked with intimate knowledge and a matchless sense of place."
Monkey Boy (2021) Francisco Goldman "Monkey Boy is written with tenderness and emotional precision. It tells what it means to be an American, to have an identity that is nourished by many sources, including ones that are mysterious and shrouded in secrecy. It is a story of two cities--Boston and Guatemala--and an account of a man's relationship with his mother, who is evoked here in sharp and loving detail. It is a book about how we piece the past together. Goldman bridges the gap between imagination and memory with stunning lyricism and unsparing clarity."
The Five Wounds (2021) Kirstin Valdez Quade "The characters in this engrossing novel are created in luminous and memorable detail. Just as the pacing is perfect, so too are the tact and care with which each scene is made. Kirstin Valdez Quade, by concentrating on the truth of small moments, has brought a whole world into focus."
Hades, Argentina (2021) Daniel Loedel "An astonishingly powerful novel about the complex nature of guilt. It sets the personal against the political with real emotional accuracy and sharp narrative skill."
A Luminous Republic (2020) Andrés Barba "A Luminous Republic has all the stark power of a folk-tale or a fable. It also raises concerns that are pressing and contemporary—about the function and source of language, about public paranoia and hysteria, about the idea of community and how information spreads. At the book’s center is a moving personal story about memory and loss. The narrative is engaging, at times playful, wholly compelling."
Last Stories (2018) William Trevor "In the first few paragraphs of a story he could set an entire scene without seeming to, working on details, small moments, odd thoughts. As in the work of Alice Munro, there often seemed to be very little happening in his fiction, but then he was capable of offering the reader a sense of an immense drama."
West (2018) Carys Davies "West has all the stark power and immediacy of a folk-tale or a legend. It is also structured with great artistry, a beguiling sense of form and pace, and a depth in the way the characters are created, making clear that Carys Davies is a writer of immense talent."
Midwinter Break (2017) Bernard MacLaverty "Midwinter Break is a work of extraordinary emotional precision and sympathy, about coming to terms - to an honest reckoning - with love and the loss of love, with memory and pain. Full of scenes that are rendered with exquisite accuracy and care, allowing the most detailed physical descriptions to be placed against the possibility of a rich spiritual life, this is a novel of great ambition by an artist at the height of his powers."
Hot Little Hands (2016) Abigail Ulman "Ulman knows how to write a story, manage a build-up, hold your attention...I love how-up-to-the-minute and street-wise these stories are, and how frank about sex and girls."
You Have Me to Love (2015) Jaap Robben "You Have Me to Love is an intense and dramatic novel filled with meticulous use of detail and a forensic psychological accuracy. Its power comes from the fierce energy of the narrative structure, the way of handling silence and pain, and the ability to confront the darkest areas of experience with clear-eyed sympathy and care. Jaap Robben handles delicate, dangerous material with subtlety and sympathy, but also with a visionary sense of truth that is masterly and unforgettable."
The Dirty Dust (2015) Máirtín Ó Cadhain "...the greatest novel to be written in the Irish language, and among the best books to come out of Ireland in the twentieth century."
Solace (2011) Belinda McKeon "A novel of quiet power, filled with moments of carefully-told truth... this book will appeal to readers both young and old."
To the End of the Land (2010) David Grossman "A masterpiece... One of the few novels that feel as though they have made a difference in the world."
John the Revelator (2009) Peter Murphy "An absolutely wonderful book... so fresh and so contemporary, so original and so disturbing and brave."
Cockroach (2008) Rawi Hage "[A] dark and uncompromising vision. [Cockroach] offers a version of an émigré underground which is original, raw and brave."
Lost City Radio (2007) Daniel Alarcón "A gripping and tense political fable by one of the most exciting and ambitious writers to emerge in recent years."
