The Irish Times Books Podcast

To celebrate the centenary of the birth of author and New Yorker magazine staff writer Maeve Brennan, whose work went largely unnoticed here until after her death, Irish Times books editor Martin Doyle and journalist Patrick Freyne talked to her biographer Angela Bourke.

Anakana Schofield talks to Laura Slattery about Martin John, "a novel about compulsion, poverty and sexual deviance".

Welcome to the Irish Times Book Club podcast, recorded earlier this month in association with the Irish Writers Centre in Dublin’s Parnell Square. This month’s title is Solar Bones by Mike McCormack, currently shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize.

It is 20 years since McCormack’s debut collection of stories, Getting it in the Head, won him the prestigious Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Two years later came his fist novel, Crowe’s Requiem, then a seven-year gap to its follow up, Notes from A Coma, described by John Waters as the best Irish novel of the decade, then another seven-year gap before his second collection, Forensic Songs in 2012.

This month's book club features Lucy Caldwell, author of Multitudes, in conversation with Laura Slattery.

This month's podcast.

Joanna Walsh, author of Vertigo, talks to Laura Slattery in the Irish Writers’ Centre about how she writes, her distinctive take on the short story, women writers and erotica

Henrietta McKervey reads an extract from her second novel, The Heart of Everything, and discusses with Martin Doyle, assistant literary editor of The Irish Times, its themes of memory and its loss, family relationships and dementia .

Rob Doyle discusses his collection of inter-linked fictions, This is the Ritual, his follow-up to his successful debut, Here are the Young Men, with Laura Slattery, co-host of the Irish Times Book Club podcast, in front of a live audience at the Irish Writers Centre, Dublin. The wide-ranging interview explores the author’s autobiographical approach to writing, the writers who populate his fictions and his desire to test boundaries.

The Glorious Heresies author Lisa McInerney talks to Martin Doyle

Mrs Engels author Gavin McCrea talks to Laura Slattery.