Noir: Spring promises bumper harvest for Bruen

Spring promises bumper harvest of exciting titles

A rich crop of established and new Irish talent is unearthed as Alison Walsh previews what publishers have in the offing, right across the genres

THE nice thing about spring, along with the prospect of longer days, is that our reading springs to life, with varied and enticing offerings from publishers to shake off recessionary doom and gloom.

Joyce is a big theme for 2012, with the master's work now out of copyright. O'Brien Press will be the first to leap from the traps, with its edition of Dubliners (€7.99) out in February, complete with an introduction by John Boyne, while Penguin Classics has The Restored Finnegan's Wake, painstakingly reconstructed from the original by Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon (€30) out in April.

VERSE: The release of 'The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett' may cast the playwright?s literary origins in a different light

Ireland is enjoying a golden age in crime writing, and Ken Bruen is, of course, the father of them all. In his latest, Headstone (Transworld Ireland, April, €17.15), a mysterious, evil group is committing random killings in Jack Taylor's native Galway.