Books by Irish Authors
To celebrate St Patrick’s Day, we have reviewed a selection of books written by Irish authors. Have fun exploring these reviews. Call into the iCentre to borrow any that appeal to you.
Sarah Crossan
Apple & Rain
Apple’s mother disappeared years ago, leaving Apple with her nana and a lot of unanswered questions. But when she unexpectedly explodes back into Apple’s life like a comet, homecoming is bittersweet. It’s only when Apple meets someone more lost than she is that she begins to see things as they really are.
Toffee
Allison has run away from home and with nowhere to live finds herself hiding out in the shed of what she thinks is an abandoned house. But the house isn’t empty. An elderly woman named Marla, with dementia, lives there – and she mistakes Allison for an old friend from her past called Toffee.
Allison is used to hiding who she really is, and trying to be what other people want her to be. And so, Toffee is who she becomes. After all, it means she has a place to stay. There are worse places she could be.
But as their bond grows, and Allison discovers how much Marla needs a real friend, she begins to ask herself – where is home? What is a family? And most importantly, who am I, really?
One
Tippi and Grace share everything—clothes, friends . . . even their body. Writing in free verse, Sarah Crossan tells the sensitive and moving story of conjoined twin sisters, which will find fans in readers of Gayle Forman…
Moonrise
Joe hasn’t seen his brother for ten years, and it’s for the most brutal of reasons. Ed is on death row. But now Ed’s execution date has been set, and Joe is determined to spend those last weeks with him, no matter what other people think. This poignant, stirring, huge-hearted novel asks big questions. What value do you place on life’ What can you forgive’ And just how do you say goodbye?
Breathe
When oxygen levels plunge in a treeless world, a state lottery decides which lucky few will live inside the Pod. Everyone else will slowly suffocate. Years after the Switch, life inside the Pod has moved on. A poor Auxiliary class cannot afford the oxygen tax which supplies extra air for running, dancing and sports. The rich Premiums, by contrast, are healthy and strong. Anyone who opposes the regime is labelled a terrorist and ejected from the Pod to die.
Sixteen-year-old Alina is part of the secret resistance, but when a mission goes wrong, she is forced to escape from the Pod. With only two days of oxygen in her tank, she too faces the terrifying prospect of death by suffocation. Her only hope is to find the mythical Grove, a small enclave of trees protected by a hardcore band of rebels. Does it even exist, and if so, what or who are they protecting the trees from?
Resist
The shocking and thrilling sequel-and conclusion-to Breathe. Three teens confront danger, uncertainty, and the yearning to live-and breathe-freely.
Moira Fowley-Doyle
The Accident Season
The accident season has been part of seventeen-year-old Cara’s life for as long as she can remember. Towards the end of October, foreshadowed by the deaths of many relatives before them, Cara’s family becomes inexplicably accident-prone. They banish knives to locked drawers, cover sharp table edges with padding, and switch off electrical items – but injuries follow wherever they go, and the accident season becomes an ever-growing obsession and fear.
Anna Carey
Eve (#1 The Eve Trilogy)
A deadly virus wipes out most of the Earth’s population, and the world becomes a terrifying place. Eve has never been beyond the heavily guarded perimeter of her school, where she and 200 other orphaned girls have been promised a bright future in The New America. But the night before graduation, Eve learns the shocking truth about her school’s real purpose and the horrifying fate that awaits her. Fleeing the only home, she’s ever known, Eve sets off on a long treacherous journey, searching a for a place she can survive. Along the way she encounters Caleb, a rough, rebellious boy living in the wild. Caleb slowly wins her trust and her heart. But when soldiers begin hunting them, Eve must choose between true love and her life.
This popular series in the iCentre includes Once (#2) and Rise (#3)
Louise O’Neill
Only Ever Yours
In a world in which baby girls are no longer born naturally, women are bred in schools, trained in the arts of pleasing men until they are ready for the outside world. At graduation, the most highly rated girls become “companions”, permitted to live with their husbands and breed sons until they are no longer useful.
For the girls left behind, the future – as a concubine or a teacher – is grim.
Best friends Freida and Isabel are sure they’ll be chosen as companions – they are among the most highly rated girls in their year.
But as the intensity of final year takes hold, Isabel does the unthinkable and starts to put on weight. And then, into this sealed female environment, the boys arrive, eager to choose a bride. Freida must fight for her future – even if it means betraying the only friend, the only love, she has ever known. . .
Asking For It
It’s the beginning of the summer in a small town in Ireland. Emma O’Donovan is eighteen years old, beautiful, happy, and confident. One night, there’s a party. Everyone is there. All eyes are on Emma.
The next morning, she wakes on the front porch of her house. She can’t remember what happened, she doesn’t know how she got there. She doesn’t know why she’s in pain. But everyone else does.
Mary Watson
The Wren Hunt
Every winter, Wren Silke is chased through the forest in a warped version of a childhood game. The boys who hunt her are judges, powerful and frightening pursuers, who know nothing of her true identity. If they know she was an augur, their sworn enemy, the game would turn deadly…
Ciara Smyth
The Falling in Love Montage
Saoirse has a simple plan for the summer before Uni starts, party, watch horror movies and forget all her troubles by kissing girls. Between getting over her ex and dealing with the pain of her mum’s illness, Saoirse feels she deserves a break. Enter the scene: Ruby, romcom fan and optimist. Ruby is the prettiest girl Saoirse has ever seen, but Saoirse doesn’t want to get into another relationship. So, Ruby challenges her to try a summer romance with the serious parts left out, just like in the movies. But what happens when the falling in love montage ends?
Adiba Jaigirdar
The Henna Wars
Nishat’s parents say she can be anyone she wants – as long as she isn’t a lesbian. She doesn’t want to lose her family, but she also doesn’t want to hide who she is, which only gets harder once Flavia walks into her life.
Beautiful and charismatic, Flavia takes Nishat’s breath away. But as their lives become tangled, they’re caught up in a rivalry that gets in the way of any feelings they might have for each other. Can Nishat find a way to be true to herself and find love too?
Claire Hennessy
Like Other Girls
Here’s what Lauren knows: she is not like other girls. She also knows it’s problematic to say that – what’s wrong with girls? She’s even fancied some in the past. But if you were stuck in St Agnes’s, her posh all-girls school, you’d feel like that too. Here everyone’s expected to be perfect young ladies, and it’s even the name of a song in the painfully awful musical they’re putting on this year. And obviously the musical is directed by Lauren’s arch nemesis.
Under it all though, Lauren’s heart is bruised. Her boyfriend thinks she’s crazy and best friend is going through something Lauren can’t understand so when Lauren realises, she’s facing every teenage girl’s worst nightmare, she has nowhere to turn. Maybe she should just give in to everything. Be like other girls. That’s so much easier…right?
Peadar O’Guilin
The Call
This is an iCentre classic!
On her birthday, Nessa finds out the terrible truth about her homeland, Ireland – the truth that will change her forever.
That she and her friends must train for the most dangerous three minutes of their lives: THE CALL
That any day now, without warning, they will each wake in a terrifying land, alone and hunted, with a one in ten chance of returning alive.
And it is Nessa, more than anyone, who is going to need every ounce of the courage, wit, and sheer spirit she was born with, if she – and the nation – are to survive.