New Writing from Ireland at the Bay Area Book Festival

Ireland has been the source of some of the most exhilarating and subversive new fiction in recent years, and these are three of its shining stars. Claire-Louise Bennett made a splash with her debut collection, Pond, and more than delivers on its promise with Checkout 19, a narratively unconventional novel featuring a nameless narrator who, The New Yorker writes, “for good and for ill, both clings to and disowns her life.” The “brilliant, confounding” (The New Yorker) Sarah Moss presents The Fell, a breathless novel that explores fear and connection as a woman leaves pandemic lockdown to take a walk in the hills (“a page-turner…. I gulped The Fell down in one sitting,” says Emma Donoghue). And County Mayo’s Colin Barrett, who swept international literary awards with his debut, Young Skins, has penned a second collection, Homesickness, that Sally Rooney called “mesmerizingly powerful.” Moderated by novelist and essayist Rosemary Graham, this event is a fascinating dispatch from the small isle whose literary shadow, past and present, looms large.

(All three authors appear in additional sessions at the festival as well.)