Irish Times: Books to Look Out for in 2025

‘These moving short stories are brave, honest, raw and funny, doing what fiction does best, showing us the lives of others and in so doing showing us ourselves. Wonderful.’ —Kit de Waal

‘From a son paring the bunions on his mother’s feet to a man’s soul getting sealed out of his body, and culminating in a deft interlinked cycle, the stories of I Hear You are warm, frank and unsentimental, bursting with character and idiosyncratic detail, written with Paul McVeigh’s characteristic geniality and Belfast wit.’ —Lucy Caldwell

This collection of stories, written especially for BBC Radio 4, includes a ten-part sequence: ‘The Circus’, set around Cliftonville Circus, where five roads meet in North Belfast. It’s five minutes from the nationalist Troubles flashpoint of Ardoyne, where Paul grew up. It’s close to Holy Cross Girls’ School, where protests targeting primary school children drew international attention.

The Circus is situated in the poorest part of the Belfast – it is also the most divided. Each road leads to a different area – a different class – a different religion. The Circus explores where old Belfast clashes with the new around acceptance, change, class and diversity.

But this is 2024 and a fresh energy exists.

Other stories include ‘Tickles’, a story about a man visiting his mother in a dementia ward where he finds he is the one who had forgotten important things.

‘Cuckoo’, about a man’s collapse and surgery – where he feels something more sinister has happened to him; and ‘Daddy Christmas’, where a gay man writes a letter to the son he never had.