I lived in Brooklyn for a year in my early twenties, and part of me is always trying to get back – physically or imaginatively. Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler placed me so squarely back in New York that I ached while reading it. The story follows Tess, a 22-year-old who moves to the city to work in the restaurant world, getting a job as a backwaiter in a renowned Union Square establishment. The descriptions of food and wine are gorgeous; the portrayal of being young, broke, vulnerable but also slightly ruthless will resonate with anyone who has ever moved to a big city to try to ‘make it’. And Danler’s prose is evocative. Here, she describes Tess’s descent on the city: ‘Let’s say I was born in late June of 2006 when I came over the George Washington Bridge at 7am with the sun circulating and dawning, the sky full of sharp corners of light, before the exhaust rose, before the heat gridlocked in, windows unrolled, radio turned up to some impossibly hopeful pop song, open, open, open.’

I adore short story collections, partly because each one contains multiple worlds. This is especially true of the work of Karen Russell, whose debut St Lucy’s Home For Girls Raised By Wolves cemented my love of the form. We visit an alligator theme park in the Florida swamps in ‘Ava Wrestles the Alligator’, follow a convoy of wagons led by a minotaur in ‘Children’s Reminiscences of the Westward Migration’, and meet a feral pack of human wolves in the title story. Through all the magic realism and quirky humour, Russell’s work is moving, thought-provoking and humane.

The first word that comes to mind when I think of Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat is ‘generosity’. In the early pages of the book, she invites us into her home and heart, a mesmerising routine of mothering, cleaning, expressing milk, and poring over poetry. In the later sections, we follow her on a detective trail for traces of the life of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, an Irish noblewoman and poet. Ní Ghríofa thrusts the reader vividly back to the 18th century, weaving together a portrait of Ní Chonaill from the scant information she uncovers. As good as everyone says – and better.

I can’t believe, given the year that we’ve just had, that I’m selecting a pandemic novel to round out this list, but Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel is – if this is possible – a cosy, beautifully written and transportative novel about a flu outbreak that devastates the world’s population. Told from multiple perspectives in Mandel’s understated prose, the book begins with the onstage death of an actor during a production of King Lear in Toronto, amid rumours of a mysterious flu. Twenty years later, cast member Kirsten tours the devastated Great Lakes region as part of a travelling troupe of actors, seeking the Museum of Civilisation, rumoured to be a safe haven. ‘Survival is insufficient’ is the motto of Kirsten’s Travelling Symphony, underscoring the importance of art to the human spirit – a message that hits even closer to home now than it did when the book was published seven years ago.

Holding Her Breath by Eimear Ryan is published by Sandycove, €15 and is a story of passion, family and identity.