Young female Irish writers are setting a new trend in fiction

Publishers everywhere are looking for the new Sally Rooney, which is odd since as far as I know the old one is still around. As a result Ireland, which has never lacked literary talent, is giving us a lot of debut novels by young female writers this year. True, being the new Sally Rooney makes a change from being the new Irish Chekhov, but it is a high-risk strategy when many are called but few are chosen. Here are two of the most prominent debuts, with more, including Elaine Feeney’s much-vaunted As You Were, due in the coming months.

Naoise Dolan is the most Rooneyed of them all by people who have read Conversations with Friends and think Rooney is a comic writer, or have read Normal People and think she is a relationships writer, when in fact she is simply — as James Joyce described Flann O’Brien — a real writer. Dolan is a real writer too, and her novel Exciting Times, about ‘how you can be having sex with two people, tell neither about the other, be living with one of them, and still be single’ is smart and funny.

At the centre of its sexual-romantic tangle is Ava, a 22-year-old Irishwoman living in Hong Kong as an English teacher. She went there because ‘everyone in Dublin hated me, such that I came to hate myself too’, but finds herself surrounded by — and attracted to —posh people whose accents have ‘pinnacles and spires’.

Ava swerves sexually between Julian, an Etonian financier, and Edith, a lawyer, all the while hiding her feelings behind wisecracks. And she’s good at the zingers: her boss ‘dressed to please no one, not even himself’; an acquaintance seems like ‘someone else ironed everything for her — her whole life — and her role was to make new creases’.