Ireland’s unique countryside seeps into many great novels, becoming as much a character as any protagonist. Paul Charles picks his top 10 rural Irish books
Rural Ireland has a unique place in English literature and has served as a backdrop to untold great novels. It is at once foreign but familiar, rich in resources yet impoverished, bucolic yet violent. Its landscape, characterised by stone walls, green fields and unforgiving coastlines, is redolent of mythology, folklore and magic. From William Trevor’s poignant The Story of Lucy Gault to the fear and violence of Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal, the rural landscape is always there, as much a character as the protagonists themselves.
I set my current novel, The Lonesome Heart is Angry, in Castlemartin, a fictitious Mid-Ulster village, because doing so allowed me to observe the rural pace of life and examine in great detail people who are too busy living their lives to be preoccupied by them. I grew up in Magherafelt, a similar village, and was a messenger boy for a grocer shop. As I delivered groceries, I got to hear first-hand all the village gossip and discovered exactly how destructive it could be.
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I set my current novel, The Lonesome Heart is Angry, in Castlemartin, a fictitious Mid-Ulster village, because doing so allowed me to observe the rural pace of life and examine in great detail people who are too busy living their lives to be preoccupied by them. I grew up in Magherafelt, a similar village, and was a messenger boy for a grocer shop. As I delivered groceries, I got to hear first-hand all the village gossip and discovered exactly how destructive it could be.
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