Ciaran Carson Books In Order

Novels

Shamrock Tea (2001)
The Pen Friend (2009)
Exchange Place (2012)

Collections

In the Light of (2012)

Non fiction

Pocket Guide to Irish Traditional Music (1986)
Inside Information (1995)
The Belfast Frescoes (1995)
Last Night’s Fun (1996)
The Star Factory (1997)
Fishing for Amber (1999)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

In the Light of
(2012)

Non fiction Book Covers

Ciaran Carson Books Overview

Shamrock Tea

Ingeniously combining magic, memory, and history, Ciaran Carson constructs his story around the concept of Shamrock Tea, a drink that allows people to experience the world with visionary clarity. But this magical substance can only be found by passing through van Eyck’s painting The Arnolfini Marriage. The characters who know this secret include young Carson, his uncle Celstine, his cousin Berenice, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Father Browne, and the nephew of the famous Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck. Everything connects with everything else: one of the book’s presiding geniuses is Arthur Conan Doyle, who believes the world can be read in a drop of water. Shamrock Tea is an homage to this idea, to an enchantingly medieval sense of the unity of the world, which is also called magic.

The Pen Friend

More than twenty years after the end of their love affair, Gabriel receives a series of cryptic postcards from his old flame. Inspired to write his own letter, Gabriel dwells in sensuous detail on perfumes, clothes, and conversations as he tries to recapture the spirit of their romance in 1980s Belfast. As Gabriel teases out the significance of the postcards, the layers of meaning in the images and messages, his reveries develop into richly textured meditations on writing, memory, spiritualism, and surveillance. The result is an elaborate and intricate web of fact and fiction, a narrative that marries sharp historical insights with imaginative exuberance, a strange and wonderful novel confirming Ciaran Carson as one of Ireland’s most exciting writers.

Last Night’s Fun

Last Night’s Fun‘s is a sparking celebration of music and life that is itself a literary performance of the highest order. Carson’s inspired jumble of recording history, poetry, tall tales, and polemic captures the sound and vigor of a ruthlessly unsentimental music. Last Night’s Fun is remarkable for its liveliness, honesty, scholarship, and spontaneous joy; certainly there has never been a book about Irish music like this one, and few books ever written anywhere about the experience of music can compare with it.

Fishing for Amber

Fishing for Amber dazzles with its weave of narratives and the sheer pleasure taken in unwinding the three narrative strands: ribald telling of tales from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, dark and disturbing Irish fairy stories, and fantastic tales of 17th century Dutch painting. The universal theme is that of transmutation and the power of art: of light captured on canvas, experience immortalized in narrative. Stories branch infinitely into other stories, each connecting, and each fishing for the truth. The central image of amber, of light or creatures captured in it, transformed by it, is sustained throughout the book.