Circle of Friends By Maeve Binchy Dubliner Maeve Binchy may not go down in Irish history as one of its Dublin's literary innovators, but she has earned a large and loyal following for her skill as a storyteller. Binchy attended University College Dublin and wrote for the Irish Times before becoming a best-selling novelist. Of her 11 novels, Circle of Friends is probably the most well known as a result of being made into a Hollywood movie starring Minnie Driver. Set in the 1950s, it's the story of Benny and Eve, two close childhood friends who leave their village of Knockglen to attend university in Dublin. There, new additions to their circle of friends test their loyalty to each other.
Gulliver's Travels (1726) By Jonathan Swift Despite being born in Dublin, graduating from Trinity College and later becoming dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Swift was a somewhat reluctant Dubliner. He returned to the city of his birth after falling out of favor with London's political elite for his outspokenness against political and religious corruption. His bitterness over this banishment is clearly evident in his most famous work, Gulliver's Travels, which ironically has become a children's classic. The book describes Gulliver's journeys to imaginary countries populated by giants, midgets and talking horses but is in fact a biting satire of British society in particular and human nature in general.
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993) By Roddy Doyle Before becoming one of Dublin's most acclaimed literary voices, Roddy Doyle taught English and geography at a public school in a working-class neighborhood of Dublin for 14 years. This, perhaps, explains the skill with which he was able to reproduce the voice of a ten-year-old Irish boy in his Booker Prize-winning novel, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. Paddy Clarke, the book's narrator and protagonist, lives with his ma and pa and younger brother in Barrytown, a working-class neighborhood of Dublin and the setting for Doyle's three previous novels. Lest we forget, Paddy reminds us that being ten is no picnic. Full of Irish slang, colloquialisms and curses, Paddy's struggles to make sense of a bewildering, adult world is both comical and poignant.
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) By Oscar Wilde Born in Dublin to an eminent Irish surgeon and his wife, a well-known Dublin writer, Oscar Wilde studied classics at Trinity College before winning a scholarship to Oxford University. Most famous for his comic plays, The Picture of Dorian Gray was Wilde's only novel. Wilde was a disciple of aestheticism, a movement that celebrated beauty for beauty's sake without regard for moral concerns. And yet, this novel is the cautionary tale of a beautiful, young man who indulges his every desire without suffering any physical effects only to receive his comeuppance at the end of the story. The book is most enjoyable not for its plot but for Wilde's famously witty epigrams, including "When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy."
Ulysses (1922) By James Joyce Joyce lived most of his adult years in continental Europe but set all of his most famous works, including Ulysses, in his native city. Ulysses is the epic account of one day in the life of Leopold Bloom, a Jewish salesman. His adventures are meant to parallel those of Homer's Ulysses, except that they each occupy just one hour of his day and take place within a short distance from his Dublin home. About half-way through the book Joyce abandons the realist tradition and experiments with a stream-of-consciousness narrative that was unsettlingly new to readers at the time. Now acclaimed as the modernist masterpiece, it was widely considered to be obscene and unreadable when it first appeared and only became legally available in Britain and the United States in 1934.
