On My Bedside Table: What Is Writer Roisin Maguire Reading?
Northern Irish writer Roisin Maguire’s debut novel Night Swimmers was shortlisted for the Kate O’Brien Award in 2025. She is a keen scuba diver and fisherwoman who swims every day of the year – something that has informed her new novel, Snow Birds …
“I’m one of those people who always has two or three books on the go, but I’ve put them all down for now, captivated as I am by Maggie O’Farrell’s exquisite Land. There’s a thread of real deep Irish magic running through this hypnotic and lyrical tale of a particular, singular hillside and what it witnesses and holds and mulls over, through the millennia. O’Farrell definitely channelled something in the telling of this tale, and many parts of it feel visceral and spooky and incredibly important and painfully true.
Addressing the modern ideas of legacy and creativity against a backdrop of colonisation and gritty endurance, on the surface it’s the story of a mapmaker and his family trying to survive in the years following the Great Hunger, but I can hear drums and chanting and ancient powers all bubbling away incessantly under the tale like a hidden spring. Fabulous! Part lament for the lost things and part celebration of an enduring, ancient heritage, this is a book for the long dark evenings in the run-up to Samhain, and no mistake.”
Roisin will be at Dublin Book Festival on November 8 (free, but booking required).
Snow Birds by Roisin Maguire (Serpent’s Tail, €17) is out now.
