It has been a bountiful time for Irish fiction lately. The level of accomplishment, insight and emotional sophistication in books being published is to be celebrated. The festival is delighted to showcase the work of three emerging writers in this event, to applaud their achievement and bring their voices and words to our audience.

Their work is richly varied and circles around themes of identity, home and belonging. In fizzing and sometimes explosive prose, these writers lay bare the challenges of small-town life, city life and the compulsive desires that drive their characters. Laced with a mordant wit and sometimes laugh-out-loud moments, these novels articulate the beauty and the cost of self-examination.

In The Amusements, Aingela Flannery brings us into the world of a seaside town, with all its textures, longing and half-remembered sunny days, as its people play out the age-old dramas of staying, leaving and coming back. It is a luminous story about roads taken and not taken – and a brilliantly observed portrait of a small-town community.

Megan Nolan’s novel, Acts of Desperation inhabits a world of compulsion and unravelling desire, as the young narrator seeks to extract meaning from her doomed relationship. It is a novel that explores vulnerability and isolation with a clear-eyed and unsentimental view. An exceptionally engaging and vital voice.

With his novel Iron Annie, Luke Cassidy introduces us to the world of drugs, parties, late nights, misfits and small-town crime. In the couple of Aoife and Annie, he has created vivid and magnetic characters, whose helter-skelter lives and adventures draw us in to what is an unlikely and tender paean to belonging.

Kindly sponsored by

Venue: glór
Cost: €12/€10

Tickets available online and from glór box office. (065 6843103 – open from 10am to 2.30pm Monday to Friday and from 12pm to 5pm on Saturdays).

BOOK TICKETS