Beyond the Rainbow, an Irish Writers Centre panel discussion

In Andrew Cunning’s debut novel Clara and Christina, two women meet in an unassuming coffee shop in Belfast and they seem an unlikely pair. Clara is young, inquisitive, optimistic for what the meeting holds. Christina is older, in her seventies, still glamorous, still quick. She is working on her fifth novel but no one yet knows of its existence. Clara is there to interview Christina, for her own book, anticipating some major scoop on this reclusive novelist. She wants to unearth the truth behind the fiction. But Christina has a different lesson in store for Clara. Over a few months, a relationship forms between these two women who live their lives in books. Clara, writing her first, embraces this opportunity to learn from a writer finishing her last. During this time, Clara, face to face with her hero, begins to question her own convictions ultimately asking herself: what if there is nothing but fiction? 

The Perfect Match is Adiba Jaigirdar’s first novel for adults. Dina is done. She’s burnt out after years in corporate London and now is working in her family’s struggling Bangladeshi restaurant. The last thing she expects is to be roped into coaching a football team of disadvantaged amateur players – or to say yes. Maya is back. She could have had a brilliant career, but it all went… well, wrong. Now she’s home, back in her childhood bedroom. Her only escape is agreeing to coach her old secondary school’s team. It doesn’t take long for them to bump into each other again and for as long as anyone can remember, Dina and Maya were rivals. But will the very game that tore them apart bring them back together? 

Katherine O’Donnell’s debut novel Slant is a ground-breaking Irish lesbian love story, set across the decades from the 1980s AIDS crisis to the 2015 marriage referendum. Ro McCarthy, single in her fifties and working a quiet job, is sustained by her love of books and her deep friendships. Although she still doesn’t approve of marriage – not even for the straights – she is canvassing for yes in the 2015 marriage equality referendum. But, as the ghosts of her activist past join her on the campaign trail and her eagerness to confront a familiar discrimination turns to obsession and fury, Ro must finally face the long-buried trauma and loss of her youth. Thirty years earlier, Ro is a young Cork woman living her best life in Boston, undocumented and working multiple jobs, making life-long friends, and falling in love with Jenny. Soon, however, the young gay men who have become Ro’s new family – from Ireland and elsewhere – begin to die. Shocked and grieving, she finds purpose in AIDS activism and a community that is loving and living against all odds. In the wake of this macabre heyday which Ro just about survives, her charged entanglement with Jenny will bear witness to the resistance and survival of an invisible generation of warriors.