The Laureate says “This short novel manages to dramatize both private life and public matters. It does so by working in careful, meticulous, emotionally accurate detail, making no grand statements about character or circumstance. Everything is intimate, almost low-key, and yet the implications of the narrative are far-reaching.” 

 The Laureate says “In this novel, Moore works like a nineteenth century French painter in drawing a portrait of a spirited young women of reduced circumstances facing her destiny in an unforgiving world.” 

 The Laureate says “This is an ingeniously told story, narrated by an actual book, a novel by the Austrian writer Joseph Roth, offering an account of its picaresque travels to America and back to Europe, while in the background we learn of the life of Joseph Roth himself and the dark times he lived in. 

 The Laureate says “Colin Barrett has the ability to create character and create a scene in a few sentences. His dialogue that seems so spare and clipped manages to establish mood and build tension. His scenes are constructed with great sympathy, but there is also a bleakness in his vision. What is remarkable in his work is the texture of the language, the use of metaphor, the handling of rhythm.”

 The Laureate says “These stories are written with a spareness, a wryness, that manage to make the source of their immense power ambiguous and mysterious. In the title story, it is unclear what the dominant emotion is, whether it is grief or shock or fear or resignation. That way of writing at an angle to easy assumptions, easy interpretations, makes Mary Lavin’s stories luminous and memorable” 

 The Laureate says “This novel is a tour-de-force work about exile and the world of expats in Hong Kong. Seeking accommodation, looking for love, teaching English as a foreign language, dealing with foreigners, being Irish, calling home, are all dramatized with wit and emotional accuracy and a refusal to settle for easy narrative solutions.”

 The Laureate says “This bleak, unrelenting novel portrays a woman in the Irish midlands who has married a policeman and become a surrogate mother to his children in the time after his first wife’s death. Elizabeth, too, is facing her own death. Her character is drawn with great sympathy. The most intimate moments are handled with piercing sensitivity and truthfulness.”

 The Laureate says “This novel is written with great intensity, being set over a time period of three days in which the focus is on the entire life of a single family, all the secrets and treacheries coming into the open. Time and character are dealt with in this book with sharp insight, masterful precision.”

 The Laureate says “Edith is an engrossing and sensitive portrait of the writer Edith Somerville during the War of Independence when her writing partner Violet Ross is dead and her own career as a writer not flourishing. It is a portrait of a sensitive, solitary figure in a time of turmoil, of a woman striking out as an artist in a time when there were many barriers” 

 The Laureate says “This is another novel set during the Irish War of Independence. Just as Martina Devlin’s book is about solitude and introspection, this centres on a house party, scenes filled with chatter and strange silences, things unmentioned and unmentionable. And in the background are the insurgents, the sense of impending doom.”

 The Laureate says “MacLaverty offers a masterclass in how to create character, how to build scenes by accretion of detail, how to work with implication and suggestion, how to write indirectly and manages to create more energy and more expression by working in muted colours and plain textures.”