From the big table

Book reviews & recommendations

What we've been reading at the shop. Every book reviewed here is on the shelf or a phone call away — see one you like, and we'll have it waiting for you.

Cover of Wild Derrynane by Vincent Hyland — a gannet in flight over the Skellig Coast

✦ ÚNA’S ✦

SHOP PICK

LOCAL AUTHOR · CASTLECOVE

Local authorNatureIrish interest

Wild Derrynane

Vincent Hyland · Castlecove, Co. Kerry

★★★★★ Úna’s pick

Hello from Sneem Book Shop. I am still very proud to promote Wild Derrynane by our own Vincent Hyland, who lives just down the road in Castlecove. A big, beautiful hardback: over 500 pages, more than two thousand photographs and some six hundred species of our own Skellig Coast.

Vincent takes you right through the wildlife year, month by month, with his own stories, his paintings and a bit of poetry. This is Derrynane — Daniel O’Connell’s home place, and Ireland’s very first “Hope Spot” for the ocean — so no wonder the great Dr Sylvia Earle wrote the foreword.

A lovely gift for anyone who loves the Ring of Kerry. ❤️ Pop in and have a look. Shop open daily 10 to 5, Mon to Sat.

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Two copies of The Truth Behind the Irish Famine by Jerry Mulvihill displayed on a hand-knitted blanket at Sneem Book Shop

✦ KERRY ✦

LOCAL AUTHOR

JERRY MULVIHILL

Irish historyKerry authorIllustrated

The Truth Behind the Irish Famine 1845–1852

Jerry Mulvihill · 3rd edition, expanded

★★★★★ Shop pick

Over 400 eyewitness accounts, 78 commissioned paintings by seven internationally recognised artists, and three years of research by a Kerry author — assembled into what many consider the most comprehensive single-volume account of the Great Famine. Praised by President Michael D. Higgins and former President Mary McAleese. Essential reading.

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Her debut

Antarctica

Claire Keegan

The book that first announced Claire Keegan — her debut collection, and you can already see the whole of her in it. Stories of ordinary lives with something restless moving underneath: desire, betrayal, the things people leave unsaid, every sentence pared to the bone. It won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. A fine place to start if you’ve only met her through the films.

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Short stories

Walk the Blue Fields

Claire Keegan

Her second collection, and to our mind some of the finest stories written in Ireland this century — the judges of the Edge Hill Prize thought so too, with Hilary Mantel among them. Keegan walks us through rural Ireland: a priest at a country wedding, farmers, quiet lives cracked open by longing. Unshowy, devastating, and over far too soon. We keep a copy close to the till.

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Now a film

Foster

Claire Keegan

If you loved The Quiet Girl — An Cailín Ciúin, the film that made history as the first Irish-language nominee for an Academy Award — this is where it began. A small girl is sent to spend a summer with relatives while things are busy at home, and finds, in a quiet farmhouse, the tenderness she’s been missing. Slim enough to read in an evening, and it stays with you for years. We can rarely keep it on the shelf.

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Kerry Prize winner

Small Things Like These

Claire Keegan

A coal merchant in a small Irish town, the week before Christmas, stumbles on something at the local convent that he cannot un-see — and has to decide what kind of man he’ll be. Keegan says more in a hundred pages than most manage in five hundred. Shortlisted for the Booker and winner of the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, it’s since become a film starring Cillian Murphy. Our most-recommended book, full stop.

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Irish interest

Thirty-Two Words for Field

Manchán Magan

A love letter to the Irish language and the landscape it grew out of. Magan gathers lost and half-forgotten words — for fields, weather, seaweed, moods — and each one opens a small window onto how our ancestors saw this place. A regular favourite with visitors walking the Kerry Way.

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Local & walking

The Kerry Way (walking guide)

Clear, large-scale mapping

Ireland's longest way-marked trail passes our doorstep, and this is the guide we hand to walkers heading out on it. Stage-by-stage maps, honest notes on the climbs, and small enough for a jacket pocket. Pair it with a coffee and route tips from the counter.

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Read something great from our shelves? Tell Úna at the big table — guest reviews from customers are very welcome here.