The violence that infected the North during the decades of the Troubles was represented in a variety of forms as a generation of writers attended to how its intertwined narratives on both sides of the sectarian divide were articulated as shared experiences of national trauma in dire need of understanding and representation through the language of literature. Beginning with Seamus Heaney’s reflections in ‘Cessation 1994’ on the overwhelming difficulties but also undeniable opportunities of envisaging pathways of historical, political, and economic recovery on the eve of the Belfast Agreement, this chapter proceeds by reading Patrick McCabe’s Breakfast on Pluto and Edna O’Brien’s The Little Red Chairs as two novels that continued the unfinished work in Irish literature after 1998 of representing the traumas of violence from national and global perspectives (and thus not only in the Irish context of the Troubles).

This chapter offers a study of some key developments in Irish realism from the 1980s to the contemporary moment. The Irish novel in a variety of forms, including the bildungsroman, the family novel, the expatriate novel and political fiction, has developed significantly in this period and its highest achievements are distinguished by memorable characterisation, probing social critique, and lyrical writing. Stressing issues of form, style, and affect as well as content, the study examines a selection of Irish fictions, urban and rural, domestic and overseas, northern and southern, and considers their relationship to wider and ongoing changes in Irish society in recent times.