An introduction to all the leading Irish writers and some of the lesser known playwrights, novelists, short story writers, poets, placing them in context and providing a list of their works. Commentaries give brief but telling insights into their work.

The story of Irish writing is followed, beginning with Swift, and working through playwrights Synge and O'Casey to Beckett and Friel; from nineteenth-century poetry through Yeats to Seamus Heaney and Paul Durcan; in novels, from Maria Edgeworth, through Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Kate O'Brien, Flann O'Brien to contemporaries Julia O'Faolain, Roddy Doyle and Anne Enright.