Before it is a thriller, before it is a dark comedy, “Bad Sisters” is a love story.

The Irish tradition has long been that on Nollaig na mBan, this final day of the busy Christmas season, women get to put their feet up and enjoy a day of socializing. In some versions of the tradition, men take over the household chores.

John Banville is surely the only crime novelist in recent memory who has won the Booker Prize and is regularly rumored to be in the running for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Sometimes you have to leave home to find home. That’s the paradox of the immigrant experience, portrayed beautifully in “Brooklyn.”

“Small Things Like These” is dedicated to the girls and babies who went through the Magdalene laundries, the last of which closed in 1996.

Rooney’s novel ends up as an overlong interlude, poised between significant moments, not substantial enough to compose its own movement.