24 Books for the West of Ireland

About this list

The west of Ireland (County Clare, Galway, Mayo, Sligo and the Atlantic coast) is the setting for a lot of Irish writing, from the plays of the early 1900s to recent novels. This list collects books set there or written by people who lived there, with a focus on Irish women writers.

It's for book clubs and readers who want to know the place before they visit, or instead of visiting.

Our 17–25 June 2028 trip to the Burren →

Four tracks through the west of Ireland.

1. Irish Women Writers

   Edna O'Brien grew up in Tuamgraney, in east County Clare. Her first novel, The Country Girls (1960), was banned in Ireland, and copies were reportedly burned in her home parish. Anne Enright's The Green Road (2015) follows a County Clare family from 1980 to 2005; its title comes from a real road through the Burren. Claire Keegan's Foster is a short novel about a girl sent to stay with relatives on a Wexford farm for a summer. It isn't set in the west, but it's one of the most widely read Irish books of recent years. Nuala O'Faolain's memoir Are You Somebody? (1996) is a Dublin journalist's account of growing up and working as a woman in mid-century Ireland. Start with these four.

2. The Landscape

   Tim Robinson moved to the Aran Islands in the 1970s and spent years mapping them. Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage (1986) walks the coast of Inis Mór, the largest island, and mixes geology, ecology, archaeology and local stories. It's slow reading. Heinrich Böll's Irish Journal (1957) draws on his visits to Ireland in the mid-1950s, much of the time on Achill Island, County Mayo; Böll won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1972. It's an outsider's view of the west, which makes it a good book club read.

3. The Literary Revival

   Lady Augusta Gregory lived at Coole Park, near Gort in County Galway, and was a co-founder of the Abbey Theatre. Yeats, Synge and Shaw were among the guests who carved their initials on the Autograph Tree there. Her Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902) retells the Ulster Cycle myths in the English spoken around her home. J.M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World is set in County Mayo and caused riots at the Abbey in Dublin when it opened in 1907. Yeats's prose collection The Celtic Twilight (1893) gathers Irish folklore and stories he heard. These are the writers the later women on this list were writing after.

4. Contemporary Fiction

   Tana French is best known for her Dublin Murder Squad novels, which are set in and around Dublin. For the west, read The Searcher (2020): a retired Chicago detective moves to Ardnakelty, a fictional village in the west of Ireland, and is asked to find a missing teenager. Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture (2008) follows Roseanne McNulty, a woman from Sligo who has spent most of her life in mental hospitals in Sligo and Roscommon. Mike McCormack's Solar Bones (2016) is written as one long sentence: a dead engineer back in his kitchen in Louisburgh, County Mayo, on All Souls' Day. Paul Murray's The Bee Sting (2023, shortlisted for the Booker Prize) follows a family in rural Ireland after the 2008 crash, told from each family member's point of view. It's the one to pick if your book club likes to argue.