The Books Editor Marsh’s Library in the shadow of St Patrick’s Cathedral is the oldest public library in Ireland. It remains largely unchanged since the 18th Century, with the books still fenced into little cubicles behind wooden screens. However, I suspect it is visited more by tourists than by natives of the city. This is…

Sean Murray: Marxist-Leninist and Irish Socialist Republican by Sean Byers (Irish Academic Press, €24.99 pb)

Who Owns Marriage? A Conversation about Religion, Government, Marriage, and civil Society ed. by Nick Park (Evangelical Association of Ireland, € 9.99)

The Great Explosion: Gunpowder, the Great War, and a disaster on the Kent marshes by Brian Dillon (Penguin Books, £18.99)

The World of Books

Cotton Wool Kids: What’s making Irish parents paranoid? by Stella O’Malley (Mercier Press, €14.99)

Praying with St Teresa of Avila by Jerome Lantry, OCD (Teresian Press, €7.00)

During the long colonial occupation, Irish people learnt to be wary of rules and laws. They considered these to be means of continuing their subjugation, and saw them as incompatible with the betterment and advancement of their family, friends and community. In a compelling book sociologist Niamh Hourigan (who is senior lecturer at the School of Sociology and…

Walking the Camino along the north shore of Spain to Santiago de Compostela has become perhaps the most active pilgrim route in the world. All kinds of people undertake the excursion, not all of them Christians by any means. This very personal book is an account of one such by a Catholic woman from Wexford,…

With the death of Günter Grass, the author of The Tin Drum, an epoch of German literature comes to a close. Born in the Free City of Danzig, in what is now a symbolic part of Poland, Grass was reared a Catholic. Though he ceased in adulthood to be a church-goer, his upbringing marked all…