12 Irish Books About Love and Luck

Addie is visiting Ireland for her aunt’s over-the-top destination wedding and hoping she can stop thinking about the one thing she did that left her miserable and heartbroken - and threatens her future. But her brother, Ian, isn’t about to let her forget, and his constant needling leads to arguments between the two once inseparable siblings.

When Addie discovers an unusual guidebook, Ireland for the Heartbroken, hidden in the dusty shelves of the hotel library, she finds herself on a whirlwind tour of the Emerald Isle, trapped in the world’s smallest vehicle with Ian and his admittedly cute, Irish-accented friend Rowan. Will she heal her broken heart and her relationship with her brother?

Our March 2023 Book Club Pick was What the Wind Knows. I read it on the plane to Ireland going back and forth between my audiobook and Kindle. The Irish accent narration was so helpful with some of the authentic Irish names. This is an excellent historical fiction book that fans of Outlander would especially love.

When Callahan Garrity gets caught in a liquor store holdup on the way home from a St. Paddy's Day party, one of her best friends is shot. Callahan and her House Mouse cleaning crew dive into the investigation - only to discover that her old friend might have been working both sides of the law as an accomplice in a string of robberies.

It will take every trick they've got to pierce the veil of secrecy surrounding an Irish police organization and prove that the case is more than it seems.

Frank’s mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank’s father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy—exasperating, irresponsible, and beguiling—does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story.

Frank lives for his father’s tales of Cuchulain, who saved Ireland, and of the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother babies.

From the moment she entered the world, Francie Nolan needed to be made of stern stuff, for the often harsh life of Williamsburg demanded fortitude, precocity, and strength of spirit. Often scorned by neighbors for her family’s erratic and eccentric behavior - such as her father Johnny’s taste for alcohol and Aunt Sissy’s habit of marrying serially without the formality of divorce - no one, least of all Francie, could say that the Nolans’ life lacked drama.

By turns overwhelming, sublime, heartbreaking, and uplifting, the Nolans’ daily experiences are tenderly threaded with family connectedness and raw with honesty.

A university research scientist, Kit Averin is practical to a fault. Even after she and her friends Zoe and Greer win the lottery, Kit doesn’t want the windfall to change her life in any way except one: she’s finally buying her first real home.

Now, between work and her new fixer-upper house, she has more than enough to keep her busy. But then an unsettlingly handsome and determined corporate recruiter shows up in her lab - and manages to work his way into her heart.

Alice has never believed in luck, but that doesn’t stop her from rooting for love. After pining for her best friend Teddy for years, she jokingly gifts him a lottery ticket - attached to a note professing her love - on his birthday. Then, the unthinkable happens: he actually wins. 

At first, it seems like the luckiest thing on earth. But as Teddy gets swept up by his $140 million windfall and fame and fortune come between them, Alice is forced to consider whether her stroke of good fortune might have been anything but.

On an island off the coast of Ireland, guests gather to celebrate two people joining their lives together as one. The groom: handsome and charming, a rising television star. The bride: smart and ambitious, a magazine publisher. It’s a wedding for a magazine, or for a celebrity: the designer dress, the remote location, the luxe party favors, the boutique whiskey. The cell phone service may be spotty and the waves may be rough, but every detail has been expertly planned and will be expertly executed.

And then someone turns up dead. Who didn’t wish the happy couple well? And perhaps more important, why?

Clara Kelley is not who they think she is. She's not the experienced Irish maid who was hired to work in one of Pittsburgh's grandest households. She's a poor farmer's daughter with nowhere to go and nothing in her pockets. But the woman who shares her name has vanished, and assuming her identity just might get Clara some money to send back home.

Clara must rely on resolve as strong as the steel Pittsburgh is becoming famous for and an uncanny understanding of business, attributes that quickly gain her Carnegie's trust. But she still can't let her guard down, not even when Andrew becomes something more than an employer. Revealing her past might ruin her future - and her family's.

When twenty-nine-year-old Sunday Brennan wakes up in a Los Angeles hospital, bruised and battered after a drunk driving accident she caused, she swallows her pride and goes home to her family in New York. But it’s not easy. She deserted them all - and her high school sweetheart - five years before with little explanation, and they've got questions.

Sunday is determined to rebuild her life back on the east coast, even if it does mean tiptoeing around resentful brothers and an ex-fiancé. The longer she stays, however, the more she realizes they need her just as much as she needs them.

As she drives her mobile library van between villages of Ireland’s West Coast, Hanna Casey tries not to think about a lot of things.

Like the sophisticated lifestyle she abandoned after finding her English barrister husband in bed with another woman. Or that she’s back in Lissbeg, the rural Irish town she walked away from in her teens, living in the back bedroom of her overbearing mother’s retirement bungalow. Or, worse yet, her nagging fear that, as the local librarian and a prominent figure in the community, her failed marriage and ignominious return have made her a focus of gossip.

Thorny, stubborn and strong, Erin McKinnon is as tough and beautiful as an Irish rose. Horse rancher Burke Logan is intrigued by his neighbors’ cousin when he meets her on a trip to Ireland, but Erin thinks Burke is nothing but a brutish American.

Impressed by her cleverness, and determined to win her over, Burke offers Erin a job at his farm in Maryland. It’s a big change from her small Irish hometown, but she decides to take a chance.