Unravelling Oliver,
Liz Nugent

'I expected more of a reaction the first time I hit her.'

Liz Nugent's gripping novel of psychological suspense,  Unravelling Oliver, is a complex and elegant study of the making of a sociopath.

Oliver Ryan is a handsome and charismatic success story. He lives with his wife, Alice, who illustrates his award-winning children's books and gives him her unstinting devotion. Their life together is one of enviable privilege and ease - enviable until, one evening after supper, Oliver attacks Alice and puts her into a coma.

In the aftermath, as everyone tries to make sense of his astonishing act of savagery, Oliver tells his story. So do those whose paths he has crossed over five decades. What unfolds is a story of shame, envy, breath-taking deception and masterful manipulation.
Raven Recommends

The Sixth Extinction,
Elizabeth Kolbert

Over the last half a billion years, there have been five mass extinctions of life on earth.

Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs.

Elizabeth Kolbert combines brilliant field reporting, the history of ideas and the work of geologists, botanists and marine biologists to tell the gripping stories of a dozen species – including the Panamanian golden frog and the Sumatran rhino – some already gone, others at the point of vanishing.

The sixth extinction is likely to be mankind’s most lasting legacy and Elizabeth Kolbert’s book urgently compels us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human.

Listen to an interview with the author

The VIDA Count for 2013 is in. Jump straight to the figures.

World Book Day will be celebrated in Ireland on March 6th with a veritable plethora of events for young readers.

Novelist and muscian Willy Vlautin talks to Tom Dunne about his work ethic, why he writes and how his latest offering The Free began life.


The Guardian selects ten authors from Urkainian territory to offer an insight into the area's national psyche.


Denis Johnson discusses his short story, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, published in The New Yorker.


Three books look at how the perennial struggle between adolescents and their parents moved online and became commoditised.


A memoir of life and death in Mississippi, Sukhdev Sandhu reviews Men We Reaped, by Jesmyn Ward.

Sonnet XXX,
William Shakespeare

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear times' waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unus'd to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
   But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
   All losses are restor'd and sorrows end.