The inspirations behind my Booker-longlisted book  

Like almost all my previous work, Wild Houses is set in a small town in the west of Ireland, right up against the tearing relentlessness of the Atlantic. It feels like one of the edges of the world, a place of tight knit, stoic community and, if you are careless or unlucky, a place of impossible loneliness. Dev, the first character we meet and the character I first started writing the book around years ago, is a reclusive young man cursed by just such luck.   

The book that made me fall in love with reading  

I was 15, maybe, idly browsing my Irish secondary school poetry anthology Soundings, when I came across T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. It was jagged, volatile, provoking and elusive, with a creeping unseemliness and sense of danger stalking its opening sections. It seemed to be a poem about a guy who was, unequivocally, a loser. It just wasn’t like anything I’d read before. I thought poetry – writing, art etc – was supposed to be stately, serene, assured. This was something different and it changed me.  

The book that made me want to become a writer  

I’d wanted to be a writer for a while – though it was always a very abstract notion, essentially a daydream – but when I read Kevin Barry’s first collection of short stories, There Are Little Kingdoms, I discovered a writer writing about a world I recognised, and doing it with vivid abandon and assuredness. It gave me inspiration, permission almost, to write about the world I knew.  

The book I return to time and time again  

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf is a book that seems to exist on its own plane, or series of planes, forming a remote and crystalline structure that seems to only incidentally tolerate human presence, and that structure seems to shift, reconfigure itself, each time, if you could call it time, you return to the book. Time is the thing, because once I’m back there, in the landscape of To the Lighthouse, I feel like I’ve always been there, and it feels like it’s the rest of it – all this – that’s the dream.  

The book I can’t get out of my head  

The Irish writer Cathy Sweeney’s debut novel Breakdown stuck with me a long time after I finished it. It’s a book about a woman who gets up one day and walks – or technically drives – out of her life. The person who leaves their life – it’s not an uncommon premise for a story – but Sweeney follows through on that premise with a degree of unnerving conviction similar books often fall shy of. It left me jangling and uneasy.  

The book that changed the way I think about the world  

It’s mysterious what sticks with you from even the greatest of books. I’m thinking now of just a moment, a tiny moment, in War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy when Rostov is riding back into military camp and while his horse is still moving, he half-dismounts, swings a leg off the horse and leans upright against its flank until it comes to a halt. Why does Rostov do this? For the gratuitous, fleeting pleasure of it. Why does Tolstoy record this moment? For that same pleasure. The pleasure of the world. 

The book that changed the way I think about the novel  

A book that came along for me just when I needed it was Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge. It’s a brilliant novel and very strange – in the angles of its approach, the way it hovers in a state of agonised reticence above Olive, its ostensible main character, who, like all my favourite characters, becomes more of a mystery the more we discover about her. On a practical level, it gave me several structural and technical examples while I was toiling away on a draft of Wild Houses. 

The book that impressed me the most  

All of Tom Drury’s trilogy; The End of Vandalism, Hunts in Dreams, and Pacific. He does so much with such gentle concision and leaves his characters and the stories they are enmeshed in open to interpretation in a way few writers have the nerve to do. He respects his reader so much.  

The book I’m reading at the moment  

I’m reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger for the third time since its publication in 2022. It’s a book about last things, unbearably austere and beautiful at times, but also shot through with a self-aware, gleefully self-parodying streak. McCarthy decided to have a lot of dark fun at the end. It’s not for everyone, but dear God in heaven it’s for me. 

The Booker-nominated book everyone should read  

Solar Bones by Mike McCormack was longlisted in 2017. It’s a humane, domestic, loving book – a book about an ordinary, ordinarily flawed, good man – told in an audacious way. It is very special.