Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s writing in her first prose work is as compelling and accomplished as in her best poetry. The book reveals her as a writer who is willing to take risks, to push back boundaries, refusing to let herself be hemmed in by the demands of genre, gender or tradition.

A huge and stately galleon, sailing slowly into harbour and slightly holed beneath the waterline, André Talley has a story or two to tell of his years in the highest reaches of the fashion industry. And for his readers’ amusement, he has a great big axe to grind too.

The narrator of Alice Lyons’s novel, an American of Irish stock raised in New Jersey, finds on a second visit to the auld sod that she has to learn to speak the language ‑ which is not as easy as she thought, as the true native language, she finds, is not Irish but silence.

The rain never seems to stop at the Scottish cabin park of Summerwater, where the population of holidaymakers reveals itself as representative of the larger nation of which it is a sodden subset, looking for scapegoats to blame for its own constricting discontent.

Since her remarkable debut, ‘The Heel of Bernadette’, Colette Bryce  has shown both variation and range in her work, developing a distinctive poetic personality that places her outside of and beyond the ‘Northern thing’.

A new volume of critical essays aims to analyse and challenge the processes that can foster and normalise the exclusion of women in the Irish film industry, in the hope that the experiences of women in the industry will be recorded and not lost to future film histories.

An account of a young Oxford graduate heading to Addis Ababa in 1961 to teach in a prestigious school geared to servicing the needs of expatriate and privileged Ethiopian mixed-sex youth might bring to mind Evelyn Waugh. But no. This is a serious and realistic novel.

The last volume of Liam Mac Cóil’s seventeenth century historical trilogy brings to life a period in Irish history when its Gaelic leaders had allied with supporters in Spain and Rome in the hope of forging a future in which Ireland would cease to be a colony of its powerful neighbour.

Writing with passion and precision, the young naturalist Dara McAnulty combines an astonishingly high and precise level of knowledge about wildlife with a passion for the educative potential of discovering, through experience, how we fit into the natural world.

The Dionysian horde that Nietzsche surely imagined battering the walls of the besieged city of Wörth in 1870 was the same horde that devastated Europe in the Thirty Years War in Rubens’s time. One war begets another, taking Europeans all the way back to the walls of Troy.

John McAuliffe’s work is often associated with domestic spaces. In his new collection a number of poems are focused on gardens and interiors, and seem wary about what is going on elsewhere - even a robin in the garden, ‘tussling with something … small for practice’.

Anne Tyler’s twenty-third novel is her shortest to date, a concerto rather than a symphony, she has conceded. Her hero, brought up in a chaotic family, values order and routine and thinks social contact unimportant, but he discovers that it is more important than he thought.

From Killary to Barna, Salthill to Inisbofin, a collection of twenty short stories gathered from Galway city and county evokes the unique spirit, atmosphere and salty tang of the western city and county perched on the windswept edge of the Atlantic.

While many commentators would argue that Sinn Féin should be awarded the prize for actually advancing traditional republican objectives over recent decades, the ‘purists’ or ‘dissidents’ who call them traitors are still with us. And will be for some time to come, a new study argues.

In Cauvery Madhavan’s novel, May Twomey and her brother Gerry are the ‘Anglo-Indian’ descendants of an Irish soldier in the British army. A little like the Anglo-Irish – neither one thing nor the other – they feel somewhat outside society, once not white enough and now not brown enough.

As poet laureate of Amsterdam, Menno Wigman took part in a scheme to memorialise in verse those in the city who had died alone. It seems an apt scheme for a poet whose work is marked by a particularly humane and democratic sensibility.

The poems in Miriam Gamble’s new collection show her to be a truly imaginative writer: in ‘Plume’, the creamy-white heads of meadowsweet are compared to the ‘creamy wigs’ of the 18^th century, to ‘the shape of Scotland’, and to fat gathered in the top of old-school milk bottles.

Michele Roberts, the acclaimed author of twenty-five books, was rather put out when her new novel was rejected. For a year, she wrote a diary as an exercise in recuperation. The result is more joyous than jaundiced, something bright and exhilarating wrested from discomposure and dismay.

Had Eileen O’Shaughnessy not taken up with George Orwell, she might have found success, if not fame, in her own right, possibly as an academic or a child psychologist. Her loss was to be his gain, something neither he nor most of his biographers have properly taken on board.

Dominic Cummings favours government guided by experts trained in mathematics and scientific thinking. This idea of epistocracy, rule by those who know, is emerging at a time when the right no longer trusts global free markets and politics have considerably dumbed down.