I invited more than 60 experts (authors, critics, academics, booksellers and festival curators – their names are listed at the bottom) to submit their 50 favourite Irish novels or short story collections of the century so far.
We collated the results into a list of the 100 most broadly popular titles, ranked in descending order based on the number of nominations each received.
I then asked the panel to fine-tune the list by ranking reordering the titles from 1 to 100, to reflect their own personal preferences and thus to establish which books had inspired the deepest love.
On Thursday, we published numbers 100 to 51 and on Friday we revealed the books ranked 50 to 26. Here is the…