The Little Red Balloon

Books Editor Martin Doyle talks to Darran Anderson about his memoir of growing up in Troubles-torn Derry, Inventory: A River, A City, A Family. They discuss the book's themes of family, history and memory, its inspiration found in the ideas of Georges Perec, and how it relates to ... Show More

Welcome to The Irish Times Books Podcast. In this latest episode, Martin Doyle talk to The Irish Times’s two regular crime fiction reviewers, Declan Burke and Declan Hughes, both acclaimed crime writers themselves, about their favourite crime fiction of 2019. So get your pen and ... Show More

On the eve of this weekend’s Echoes festival in Dalkey, celebrating Maeve Binchy and Irish writing, its programmer, author Henrietta McKervey, and Maeve’s widower, Gordon Snell, join me to talk about the thinking behind the festival and the many ways in which Maeve’s memory is be ... Show More

<p>When Elizabeth was 19, she got a job as an au pair for an 11-year-old girl named Amy. The girl and her parents lived on a horse farm in rural Georgia - it was remote and beautiful. But at night, when the house got dark and quiet, someone moved through the halls, waiting, and w ... Show More

Today I talked to Aaron Hamburger about his new novel Hotel Cuba (Harper Perennial, 2023). Two sisters fleeing the horror of the Soviet Revolution and aftermath of WW1 are disappointed when American policy prevents them from joining their older sister in New York. Older, practica ... Show More

<p>Louise Erdrich reads her story “The Hollow Children,” which appeared in the November 28, 2022, issue of the magazine. Erdrich is the author of more than a dozen works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, most recently “The Sentence” and “The Night Watchman,” which won the Pulit ... Show More

Valencia Robin’s poem portrays a tense relationship between mother and daughter; perhaps each resembling the other too much. In desperation — and shock — the daughter says the worst thing she can think of to her mother. What follows is like the fall of a dictator, a coup, an end, ... Show More