Six classic Irish books you need to read

From (arguably) the king of the modernist movement, James Joyce’s Dubliners plants the reader in the heart of - you guessed it - Dublin. This collection of short stories explores everything from sexual awakening to loss in an attempt to depict the paralysis of the city he loves.

More gothic than true horror, this book nonetheless launched a thousand nightmares (and a whole century’s worth of vampire fiction). Published in 1897, Jonathan Harper’s encounter with an ancient evil still chills the blood more than a hundred years after publication.

A devastatingly handsome young man is struck by the idea he will age - and will do anything to reverse the process. This is the strikingly modern premise of Dublin-born Oscar Wilde’s only novel. Causing wild controversy when it was first published in 1890 for its portrayal of homosexuality, The Picture of Dorian Gray has now been adapted for film over twenty times.

Irish writers are well known for conjuring up stories of ghostly happenings, and this anthology collects together the best of the best. George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett and Sheridan Le Fanu are amongst the selection of authors inviting us into their supernatural imaginations.

Winner of the 1923 Nobel Prize for Literature, W. B. Yeats is often regarded as the greatest lyrical poet that Ireland has ever produced, and one that James Joyce cited as a key influence. Yeats is everything you want in a poet: escapist, thought-provoking and politically engaged.

Castle Rackrent tells the tale of four generations of heirs to the Rackrent estate, each with their own unique quirks from the lovable to the fiendish, from the perspective of their steward, Thady Quirk. In her satirising of Anglo-Irish landlords and the way in which they perilously mismanaged the estates they presided over, using the voice of an Irish Catholic narrator, Maria Edgeworth's writing was a rebellious act in the 1790s.