New Irish Book Releases to Look Out For in the Coming Months
Published 31/01/2025
2024 was a great year for Irish writing and publishing, and we loved celebrating so many of the books and authors published last year. We’re just one month into 2025 and it looks like it’s going to be another bumper year. With an abundance of brilliant books to choose from, today we’re bringing you a little spotlight on eight great Irish books hitting the shelves over the coming months.
Frogs for Watchdogs by Seán Farrell
After years of moving from place to place, a young family finds shelter in an isolated house in the Irish countryside. Their father is missing, Mum is a healer and B a formidable big sister. In his strange new territory, a wild little boy gives voice to his experience. Dark, funny, tender and raw, this debut novel thrums with the intensity of childhood. Above all, it is an ode to the blended family: the bewildering joy, wary safety and profound new bonds of love.
Published by New Island in February
Tenterhooks by Claire-Lise Kieffer
An eerie discovery at a building site triggers a crisis for a garda and his family. A grieving woman comes to believe that she is being possessed by the spirit of her mother, and seeks an unusual exorcism. A brave new world is established as Galway City disappears slowly underwater. And a young woman experiences the morning after the night before in a strange, condemned midlands town. In this debut short story collection featuring an Ireland both strange and achingly familiar, Kieffer animates our collective past, present and future. Humorous, off-kilter, savage and surreal, she depicts the bonds that hold couples, families and communities together with a sharp, humane and deeply original slant.
Published by Banshee Press in February
The Language of Remembering by Patrick Holloway
Returning from Brazil with his wife and daughter, Oisín is looking to rebuild a life in Ireland and reconnect with his mother, Brigid, who has early onset Alzheimer’s. As her condition deteriorates she starts to speak Irish, the language of her youth, and reflect on her childhood dreams and aspirations. Mother and son embark on a journey of personal discovery, and as past traumas are exposed they begin to understand what has shaped them and who they really are. This striking debut novel asks how we connect to the people we love and how we move on from the past to find meaning in the present.
Published by Epoque Press in February
In the good seats: Essays on film
The next in this engaging series of themed essay collections, In the good seats: Essays on film, features an array of brilliant writers including Darran Anderson, Maggie Armstrong, Michael Magee, Susannah Dickey, Francis Halsall and Cathy Sweeney amongst others. In this collection, contributors explore what’s so alluring and moving about film and cinema. A childhood movie encountered on the big screen, a favourite celluloid instant, a resonating discovery, an awkward first date; the threadbare seats, the click and whirr of the projector, the sense of scale expanding.
Published by PVA in March
Rembrandt’s Promise by Barbara Leahy
Leahy’s debut novel is a stunning historical immersion into the world of Rembrandt with a gripping plot of a promise turned sour. The year is 1642 and the Dutch Golden Age is underway, with Amsterdam at the height of its powers. Geertje, an impoverished widow from Edam, enters a melting pot of wealth and culture when she becomes nursemaid in the house of renowned painter Rembrandt. After Rembrandt’s wife dies, Geertje grows close to him. Despite her friends’ warnings she begins a passionate affair with the master of light and shadow, with devastating results. Based on the true story of a wronged woman who demanded justice, with themes of feminism, loss, ambition and redemption, this will be an ideal read for fans of sumptuous historical fiction.
Published by Eriu in March
Twenty-Twenty Vision by Mary Morrisey
This collection of 20 interlinked short stories explores hindsight and late middle-age regret subtly framed within the first year of the pandemic. It’s also a portrait, an emotional map of the 1950s generation moving into the third age with a mixture of apprehension and regret. The work focuses on a handful of characters as they revisit their past and grapple with late-life perspectives. The characters make chastening discoveries – one finds after a lifetime that she’s a bullying victim, another draws up a curriculum vitae of her emotional life when there are no jobs left to apply for. Both tender and devastating, these stories explore what it means to make, and live with, a choice.
Published by Lilliput Press in April
The Good Mistress by Anne Tiernan
The affair is over – so what does she have to lose? Juliet never planned to be the other woman, but Rory was the only man she’d ever loved. Maeve, a bestselling novelist, appears to have it all, except any time for herself. Erica was the perfect wife, but Rory knew things about her that no one else can ever know. And now she’s left with a question she doesn’t want the answer to: had she lost Rory long before he died? Three women’s lives collide, they must reconcile the realities of love, betrayal, and the limits of forgiveness – because what does it truly mean to be ‘good’, anyway?
Published by Hachette Ireland in April
Water in the Desert, Fire in the Night by Gethan Dick
Here is a novel about mothering, wolves, bicycles, midwifery, post-apocalyptic feminism, gold, hunger and hope. It’s about an underachieving millennial, a retired midwife and a charismatic Dubliner who set out from London after the end of the world to cycle to a sanctuary in the southern Alps. It’s about the porousness of the female bodily experience, the challenges of being an empiricist with a sample size of one, what’s worth knowing, what’s worth living, and the necessity of irrationality. It’s about the fact that the world ends all the time, and it’s about what to try to do next.
Published by Tramp Press in May
These are just some of the captivating Irish books to look out for over the coming months. Stay tuned as we bring you more about the best in Irish writing and publishing in 2025, and don’t forget to follow your favourite writers, illustrators and publishers online to hear their news first as they have it.