Hester Casey is a food writer. She blogs at www.alchemyinthekitchen.ie. These are five of her favourite reads.

Charles de Lint
The Mystery of Grace
On the Day of the Dead, Altagracia Quintero, a tattooed mechanic who specializes in Ford hotrods, meets and falls in love with artist, John Burns. Altagracia quite literally vanishes from John´s apartment after spending the night. He tries to track her down and discovers that Altagracia died two weeks before they met. This is a book about knowing when to resolve unfinished business and when to let go.  

Suzanne Collins
The Hunger Games Series
The three books tell the story of Katniss Everdeen and the post-apocalyptic world she inhabits, where every day is a battle for survival, and that´s before she is selected to represent her district – District 12 - in the Hunger Games, a reality TV battle-to-the-death. Katniss must face the prospect of killing or being killed by her co-competitor and friend from District 12 should they both survive to the end. Unputdownable.

Eduardo Sacheri
The Secret in Their Eyes
Set in Argentina, the story is narrated by young policeman Benjamín Espósito, sent to the scene of the murder of a young woman. Subsequently two immigrant workers who were close to the scene become fall guys for the murder, and have false confessions savagely beaten out of them. Benjamín rails against corruption in the force and manages to get the two men released, bringing disciplinary actions against a fellow police officer who turns out to be extremely well connected. Benjamín´s action backfires and hampers a solution to the murder. Meanwhile, the young victim´s husband, Ricardo, pursues the case obsessively. The book spans 25 years and parallels Benjamín´s obsession with his boss, Irene, the killer´s obsession with the victim, and the widower´s obsession with the killer. 

Steven Galloway
The Cellist of Sarajevo
As the people of Sarajevo go about their lives as best they can, they are in constant fear and danger of snipers in the hills that overlook the town. The cellist is a backdrop to the story - a man who simply decides to defy his fear and go out into the street every day for twenty-two days to play. He quickly becomes a symbol of determination, endurance and resilience. We meet three main characters: Kenan, who must risk his life to collect drinking water for his family and an ungrateful neighbor, Dragan, who loses his nerve and simply cannot cross the road to get to work, so paralaysed is he by fear; and Arrow, a highly talented Sarajevan sniper, engaged in taking out the snipers in the hills as they reveal their location to take a shot at the citizens of the town. Arrow also tries to protect what the cellist has come to represent.

Martyn Bedford
The Houdini Girl
Master magician, Fletcher “Red” Brandon uses his talents to seduce Rosa, a tough young Irish woman. She moves in right away and they spend a year together in which time Red falls in love with Rosa, and yet fails to really connect with her, so tough is the shell she has encased herself in. When Rosa is killed in mysterious circumstances, Red is devastated. This devastation grows as he discovers layers upon layers of a Rosa he never knew. The police become involved and Red himself becomes a suspect. The trail of what is now a murder investigation takes us to Amsterdam, to the underbelly of a world that was Rosa´s for five terrible years. Gritty but realistic – can´t wait to read more by this writer. 

Tim O'Mahony works in Bibliographic Services at Cork City Libraries. These are his five favourite books: 

Máirtín Ó Cadhain
Cré na Cille
This is my all-time favourite book and, in my opinion, the best book to come out of Ireland in any language. The corpses in a Connemara graveyard have the power of speech and memory but can only learn what’s going on above ground when a new corpse is buried.  It is laugh-out-loud funny but has an underlying sadness, the sadness of narrow horizons, blighted lives and thwarted dreams. It hasn’t been translated yet but it is well worth the effort of reading in the original Irish. You don’t have to be an expert...I’m not and I have read it more times than I can remember. 

Emily Bronte
Wuthering Heights
The wild and passionate lives of the Earnshaws, the Lintons, and their bête noir, Heathcliff , form the plot of this novel, with its deadpan opening line ‘1801. I have just returned from a visit to my landlord’. It is the landlord’s house, Wuthering Heights, in its moorland setting, that haunts the characters and the reader. Despite the richness of landscape and atmosphere, no dramatisation does justice to the book, as the action, described by the housekeeper Nelly Dean in the same deadpan tone as the opening, takes place rather in the  country of the mind and the heart. 

Willa Cather 
My Antonia 
First published in 1918, this book tells the story of Antonia Shimerda and her family, poor Central European immigrants in the American Midwest, as seen through the eyes of Jim Burden, a boy from New England who has come to live with his grandparents on the Prairies. The generous and bighearted Antonia, five years older than Burden, carries with her the memories and hopes that are the lot of all immigrants,  and she becomes and remains a shining light for the practical middle- class Burden. Perhaps the reason why I find such resonance in the book is that it gives me an insight into the lives of my own emigrant grandaunts and granduncles, who are no more than shadows now in their homeland. Either way it is a lovely book. 

J.R.R. Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings
This is the first and the best of the modern fantasy genre,  a book which has spawned hundreds of successors. I haven’t read many of the others except for Ursula Le Guin, who is part science fiction, part fantasy (Her Earthsea trilogy, especially The Tombs of Atuan, is well worth reading). Tolkien I love.  I think it is the imagined detail, the imagined geography, mythology, literature, languages and genealogies of Middle-earth that fascinate me...and the beautiful names and songs:  ‘O Elbereth! Gilthoniel! / We still remember, we who dwell / In this far land beneath the trees / Thy starlight on the Western Seas’.  A natural favourite for a child who used to spend his time drawing maps of imaginary islands. 

Bela Zsolt
Nine suitcases
Though it feels more like a novel, Bela Zsolt’s Nine suitcases is a Holocaust memoir.  It was first published in instalments in 1946 and 1947 (Zsolt died in 1948 from the privations he had suffered during the war). Zsolt was a Hungarian Jew who spent most of the war as a forced labourer, a gravedigger in fact, with the Hungarian army which was then fighting alongside the Germans on the Russian front.  The things he saw there were unimaginable, but horribly true, and Zsolt has something of the air of one who has come back from the dead, and can speak only of Hell. There are many Holocaust books, but this one is special, beautifully written, beautifully translated, spare but powerful.