Where were the female and working-class writers in last week’s list of must-reads?

Last week’s book clinic offered advice to a woman intent on moving to Ireland because of Brexit and looking for books “to help me understand the soul of the Irish people”. Writer and critic JP O’Malley’s recommendations sparked an online controversy and provoked the Irish Times to run a piece damning his omission of women, working-class writers, contemporary literature and popular fiction. Among the dissenters was writer and broadcaster Sinéad Gleeson, who here offers an alternative literary prescription.

Ireland has changed more in the last 15 years than the previous 100 combined. Post-marriage equality, post-abortion vote, its literature has evolved too. Fiction writers have captured a new Irish literary soul, beyond what Maeve Brennan called “the bog and thunder variety of stuff foisted abroad in the name of Ireland”.

Read Eimear McBride’s blistering A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, Lisa McInerney’s The Glorious Heresies for talky urban grit, Kevin Barry’s comic parallels of new Ireland, Louise O’Neill’s Asking for It, Colin Barrett’s Young Skins for small-town claustrophobia; the queerness of Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends, This Hostel Life by Melatu Uche Okorie to understand Ireland’s complicated relationship with multiculturalism, fatherhood and mortality in Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones, the complexity of politics, geography and Northern Ireland in Lucy Caldwell, Evelyn Conlon, Eoin McNamee, and Garrett Carr’s border walk in The Rule of the Land.

Liz Nugent’s crime novels dissect the middle-class psyche, while Marian Keyes has chronicled Irish life for more than20 years with wit and humour. Poets such as Colm Keegan, Doireann Ní Ghríofa,Feeney, Stephen Sexton, Annemarie Ní Churreáin and Elaine Feeney are essential, as are anthologies: try the Stinging Fly’s 20th anniversary collection. One of the best books on Ireland’s newfound modernity is The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright (read all her novels).

The Irish soul, if it exists, is cumulative and not rooted solely in the contemporary. Go back to the novels of Edna O’Brien and John McGahern’s novels, and Maeve Brennan and William Trevor’s short stories.

Sinéad Gleeson’s debut essay collection, Constellations, will be published by Picador in 2019. Submit your question for Book Clinic below or email bookclinic@observer.co.uk