Roisín O’Donnell Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Anthologies

Roisín O’Donnell is a published Irish author who has frequently won awards for her work.

She had her short story collection Wild Quiet come out in 2016. It was shortlisted for the Kate O’Brien Award and then was longlisted for the Edge Hill Prize. She has written more short stories that have been featured in publications such as The Irish Times, The Stinging Fly, and many more. They have also been featured on RTE Radio.

Roisín has also been the winner of the An Post Irish Book Award for Short Story of the Year in 2018, and then in 2022 was shortlisted for it again. When her debut novel Nesting was released in 2025, it received a lot of positive acclaim and became an instant Sunday Times Bestseller. It was also longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and was declared ‘one of the best and most important novels of our time’ by Donal Ryan and was called a novel ‘that truly matters’ by the Irish Independent.

The author was also picked as one of the Ten Best New Novelists of 2025 by the Observer. She also won the An Post Irish Book Award for Novel of the Year 2025 for Nesting. Her stories have also been selected for different anthologies, including The Long Gaze Back.

The author has two children and they live together close to Dublin.

Wild Quiet is a 2016 collection of short stories by Roisín O’Donnell. If you have been looking for a new group of short stories to enjoy and take them either one at a time or in bigger quantities as you like, this is a great pick for you.

Different stories invite readers to join in on unusual and intriguing concepts and scenarios. A beast that dwells in closets and eats memories suddenly gets out. A Somali girl in a school in Donegal may just be tougher than she appears. A woman waits under a jasmine tree for her son who has been stolen away from her, while another features two brothers at the edge of a city who become involved in a deadly game. The scope of these stories are boundless as they occupy a unique space somewhere between what is real and what is imaginary.

These different stories allow a look at the world from different angles. Here what is ordinary is changed into something extraordinary and the extraordinary is turned into something sublime, stories pulled together with humor and compassion and introducing a new literary voice that readers will not be able to get enough of. In this collection, the author looks at what comes along with being human as well as the wild and quiet moments– grab a copy for yourself to check it out!

Nesting is a 2025 book by Roisín O’Donnell. This story shares the story of a woman who is doing her best to get out of her marriage and to begin again. If you have been looking for something fresh to add to your reading lineup, this book just might be it.

Main character Ciara Fay is outside on a bright afternoon during the spring and she ends up making a quick impulsive decision in the course of a single second that could end up changing everything for her. She grabs a bunch of clothes from the clotheslines and puts her two young daughters into her car and then just turns it on and drives away.

Her mind is going a thousand miles a minute and with so many thoughts, the only thing that she can discern out of this is that her home is not safe any longer. This time she has chosen to leave, and she is going to have to do whatever she can to stay away from it.

Everything might seem like it is really great on the outside and like she has a perfect life. Her husband Ryan is kind and attentive sometimes. He provides them with everything and comes from a nice and reliable family. They have another baby on the way. But he also does thing like paying attention to Ciara’s every move, goes into rages and makes her feel like she can’t do anything right, and has isolated her from her family, friends, and work.

Should she have gotten up and run with the girls or was fleeing going to prove to be a huge mistake? Ciara doesn’t have any support and she doesn’t even have a job, so she is dealing with providing a sense of everything being normal for her girls and trying to set something up.

The housing system is completely broken so they move into a hotel room on a floor that has plenty of other women like her. They order takeout to eat, they wash their clothes in the sink of the bathroom, and they start building community with the others who live there. Ryan is trying to do everything that he can in order to pull her back and Ciara is wavering. He’s never hit her and it could be a reliable home for her girls.

But at the same time, Ciara can’t stop remembering everything that was off. Is she being selfish by staying here with the girls or should she stick it out because they really are safer even if they are in poverty? Read this incredible book from O’Donnell to find out and grab a copy of Nesting today for a work that is suspenseful and above all a story about pursuing stability and how resilient we really can be.