What book do you recommend to friends?

I keep recommending this book - Lincoln In The Bardo by George Saunders. Its part-play, part-novel, part-poem, it's constantly changing. It’s quite funny, it’s very very sad and it’s really rooted in history, so it has something that kind of appeals to a lot of tastes.

Which book is battered and worn from reading over and over again?

Ulysses by James Joyce, this is the book I keep going back to. I studied it as an undergraduate, which is why its so battered, and it’s got all my notes in it and everything. I always take it down, read a few lines, and then put it back, and it kind of never gets old!

Which book from elsewhere would you recommend to a Dublin friend?

The Poisoned Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. It's like a sweeping novel about an American missionary family from Georgia. In 1960, they move to the Belgian Congo, to do missionary work. It paints the most vivid picture of life there. She talks about the smells and the animals and the colour of the earth, and, even though I’ve never been there, I feel like I have, because I’ve read this.