Dec 24, 2024
Nov 11,2024
The Art of Reading is a monthly book club hosted by Colm Tóibín, the Laureate for Irish Fiction.
Each month, the Laureate meets a different library book club to discuss a book by an Irish writer, highlighting outstanding Irish writing and celebrating the reader and book clubs.
The selected titles celebrate new work by contemporary Irish writers and the latest episode features Colm in conversation with Caoilinn Hughes about her novel, The Alternatives - watch above.
Caoilinn Hughes’s novel deals with the lives of four brilliant sisters, lives that have been deeply scarred by the death of their parents. As Hernan Diaz has written, this is 'a tale about sisterhood, a novel of ideas, a chronicle of our collective follies, a requiem for our agonizing species… in a prose full of gorgeous surprises… glows with intelligence, compassion, and beauty.’
Caoilinn Hughes is the author of Orchid & the Wasp, which won the Collyer Bristow Prize and was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, and The Wild Laughter, which won the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award and was longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. She was recently the Oscar Wilde Centre Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, and is now a Cullman Fellow at New York Public Library. The Alternatives is her third novel.
The Art of Reading Book Club is an initiative of the Arts Council and the Laureate for Irish Fiction, in partnership with Libraries Ireland. Find out more here.
