Putting a Spotlight on Irish & Celtic Literature

We started a monthly Irish and Celtic book club! Book selections will feature fictional and nonfictional novels with Irish or Celtic theming and/or written by authors from the Celtic nations, Irish America, and East Coast Canada. Join us in celebrating and in supporting Irish and Celtic literature. Join our Facebook group below to participate in discussions and to stay updated.
 

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June Book Club Selection

The Snapper
Roddy Doyle

Virtual Discussion: Tuesday, June 30th at 5 p.m. CT
Link coming soon
 

From the Booker Prize-winning author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, the follow-up to his acclaimed debut novel The Commitments

Twenty-year-old Sharon Rabbitte is pregnant. She’s also unmarried, living at home, working in a grocery store, and keeping the father’s identity a secret. Her own father, Jimmy Sr., is shocked by the news. Her mother says very little. Her friends and neighbors all want to know whose “snapper” Sharon is carrying. In his sparkling second novel, Roddy Doyle observes the progression of Sharon’s pregnancy and its impact on the Rabbitte family—especially on Jimmy Sr.—with wit, candor, and surprising authenticity.

About the Author

Roddy Doyle was born in Dublin in 1958. He is the author of ten acclaimed novels, including The Commitments, The Van (a finalist for the Booker Prize), Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (winner of the Booker Prize), The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, A Star Called Henry, The Guts, and most recently, Love. Doyle has also written several collections of stories, as well as Two Pints, Two More Pints, and Two for the Road, and several works for children and young adults, including the Rover novels. He lives in Dublin.

July Book Club Selection

The Book of Invasions
Rod Vick - Featured Author at the Milwaukee Irish Fest Literary Corner

Virtual Discussion: Date Coming Soon
 

The Book of Invasions is a globe-spanning adventure, a romp through history and mythology, a grudging love story, and an all-in battle against an evil hidden in plain sight. The world is stunned by the inexplicable murder of a dozen climate scientists at a remote research station in Greenland. When twenty-six-year-old Ricky Crowe, sister of a slain researcher, unexpectedly comes into possession of a parchment map found in Greenland’s 5,000-year-old ice, she attempts to set aside the demons of her own grief and alcoholism—and a terrifying past that has left her with an eight-inch facial scar—in order to determine whether the map holds a key to her sister’s fate. Bringing it to experts at the foundation that funded her sister’s research, she sets in motion a race with her new allies to unravel puzzles hidden in tombs in Egypt and Ireland and in an obscure book of Celtic myth—The Book of Invasions—before the secrets are lost to the ruthless cult that has searched relentlessly for the world-changing evil the map promises since before the pyramids were built.

About the Author

Author Rod Vick has led an unexpectedly interesting life, winning awards in national short story writing contests, climbing a mountain in bad shoes, running the Boston Marathon, battling a Coca-Cola addiction, being chosen Wisconsin State Teacher of the Year, sinking a 40-foot putt for bogey, and meeting the President of the United States in the Oval Office. However, it wasn’t until 2006 that he made a modest mark as a novelist after deciding to try something outside his usual adult sci-fi wheelhouse. He wrote Kaylee’s Choice, primarily aimed at middle readers. Hoping that the self-published book about a struggling ten-year-old dancer would find an audience, he was pleasantly (and, of course, unexpectedly) surprised when it sold thousands of copies and spawned a seven-book series. It also led to several serialized novels in national magazines that were later developed into the Dance of Time and Irish Witch book series. Recently, Mr. Vick has written historical non-fiction and an adult murder whodunit series as well. 

August Book Club Selection

Westerly
Susan Donovan Bernhard - Featured Author at the Milwaukee Irish Fest Literary Corner

Virtual Discussion: Date Coming Soon
 

In an unforgettable saga of survival, motherhood, sisterhood, and the secrets that haunt us, one desperate decision creates a fault line that spans decades and threatens to break a family wide open.

In 1946, two German sisters, child refugees in a program dubbed Operation Shamrock, arrive in Ireland to live in foster care while Europe recovers from war. Nearly fifty years later, on a fateful day in a bustling Maine farmhouse, an Irish newspaper clipping threatens to unravel Faye Sullivan’s carefully constructed life with husband William and daughters Maeve and Molly, a life already on the brink of collapse.

When tragedy strikes and the Sullivans grapple with a cascade of buried secrets, Faye must confront the truth of a childhood summer in West Cork marked by adventure, heartbreak, and a life-altering decision that now jeopardizes everything she holds dear. And while their bonds may not be what they seemed, those bonds might be the one thing strong enough to help the broken Sullivan family navigate the truth and find their way forward together.

About the Author

Susan Donovan Bernhard is the bestselling author of the novels Westerly and Winter Loon, which won the Boston Authors Club Julia Ward Howe Prize for Fiction. She is a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship recipient, a Grubstreet Novel Incubator program graduate, and a Tennessee Williams Scholar to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. A dual citizen of the United States and Ireland, Susan was born and raised in the Bitterroot Valley of western Montana and graduated from the University of Maryland. When she’s not traveling, she lives and writes in Massachusetts.