Irish YA Must-Reads

 The New Girl by Sinead Moriarty

‘At school, Ruby is the odd one out. Although Denise and Clara are her friends, they are each other’s best friends, and she is the ‘other’ friend. So when new girl Safa, a refugee who has just arrived in Ireland from Syria, joins the class, she is put sitting beside Ruby. Safa and Ruby realise that their lives are very different. But as they get to know each other, they soon discover they have more in common than they might think. A timely and heart-warming story of friendship from one of Ireland’s best-loved storytellers.’

Beautiful World Where Are You? By Sally Rooney

‘Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a distribution warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend Eileen is getting over a breakup and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood.’

All The Bad Apples by Moira Fowley Doyle

‘On Deena’s seventeenth birthday, the day she finally comes out to her family, her wild and mysterious sister Mandy is seen leaping from a cliff. The family is heartbroken but not surprised. The women of the Rys family have always been troubled – ‘bad apples’, their father calls them – and Mandy is the worst of them all. But then Deena starts to receive the letters. Letters from Mandy claim that their family’s blighted history is not just bad luck or bad decisions but a curse handed down to the Rys women through the generations. Mandy has gone searching for the curse’s roots, and now Deena must begin a desperate cross-country hunt for her sister, guided only by the letters that mysteriously appear in each new place. What Deena finds will heal their family’s rotten past – or rip it apart forever.’

Guard Your Heart by Sue Divin

‘Aidan and Iona, now eighteen, were both born on the day of the Northern Ireland peace deal. Aidan is Catholic, Irish, and Republican. With his ex-political prisoner father gone and his mother dead, Aidan’s hope is pinned on exam results earning him a one-way ticket out of Derry. To anywhere. Iona, Protestant and British, has a brother and father in the police. She’s got university ambitions, strong faith and a genuine belief that boys without one-track minds are a myth. Aidan wanders alone across the Peace Bridge at a post-exam party and becomes the victim of a brutal sectarian attack. Iona witnessed the attack, picked up Aidan’s phone and filmed what happened, and gets in touch with him to return the phone. When the two meet alone, and on neutral territory, their differences seem insurmountable. Both their fathers held guns, but safer to keep that secret for now. Despite their differences and the secrets they have to keep from each other, there is mutual intrigue, and their friendship grows. And so what? It’s not the Troubles. But for both Iona and Aidan, everything seems to keep them apart when all they want is to be together .’