“Says who?” is often my reaction when presented with any “Best of …” list in the media. Mindful of this and the knowledge that any verdict is only as trustworthy as the calibre of the jurors, I invited more than 60 experts (authors, critics, academics, booksellers and festival curators – their names are listed at the bottom) to submit an unranked list of their 50 favourite Irish novels or short story collections of the century so far, either titles they loved or ones they felt were too significant to overlook.
My colleague, data analyst Cathal Stack, collated the results into a list of the 100 most broadly popular titles, ranked in descending order based on the number of…