Book Club September '26 - May '27
Connect through the love of reading!
DCU will continue its ever popular book club next semester. This is the eight book club season and what a fantastic programme there is in store.
The format of the book club will continue in-person across various locations on campus. And, we have added lunch time events too! Staff, students and the local community get an opportunity to engage in a Q&A with guest authors as part of these moderated events.
As always there is no cost to join or attend, all you need are the books. Whether you borrow a copy from the library, buy your own print copy, download to your tablet, or download it on Audible, the format is up to you! The programme is developed by DCU Cultural Arts Office in partnership with DCU Library.
The Programme
Book in September: All Them Dogs by Djamel White
When: Thursday 10th September 2026 @ 18:30
Venue: Belvedere Library, St. Patrick's Campus
To book: Eventbrite Registration Link
Book in October: The Night Watch by Sarah Waters
When: Thursday 15th October 2025 @ 18:30
Venue: Seamus Heaney Theatre, St. Patrick's Campus
To book: Eventbrite Registration Link
Book in January: Said the Dead by Doireann Ní Ghríofa
When: Thursday 21st January 2026 @ 18:30
Venue: Belvedere Library, St. Patrick's Campus
To book: Eventbrite Registration Link
Information on the books and writers featured
Book in September – All Them Dogs by Djamel White
All Them Dogs is a claustrophobic masterpiece - an emotionally devastating literary crime novel set in Dublin's underworld, where violence, poverty, and toxic masculinity form a brutal backdrop to a brilliantly tender love story. Here is an intimate tale of violence and desire that is as sharp as the knives wielded on the page. Djamel White has taken a familiar genre and turned it into something bright and new, burning like white phosphorus.
About the Author
Djamel White is a writer from Dublin, Ireland. He holds an MFA from University College Dublin and is the recipient of a Literature Bursary Award and an Agility Award from the Arts Council of Ireland. His debut novel All Them Dogs will be published in 2026 by John Murray Press, and Riverhead Books.
Book in October – The Night Watch by Sarah Waters
The Night Watch is the extraordinary story of four Londoners: Kay, who wanders the streets in mannish clothes, restless and searching… Helen, who harbours a troubling secret… Viv, a glamour girl, recklessly loyal to her soldier lover… and Duncan, an apparent innocent, struggling with demons of his own. Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked-out streets, illicit liaisons and sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, this is an astonishing novel.
About the Author
Sarah Waters is the New York Times bestselling author of The Paying Guests, The Little Stranger, The Night Watch, Fingersmith, Affinity, and Tipping the Velvet. She has been shortlisted three times for the Man Booker Prize, has been a finalist twice for the Orange Prize, and was named one of Granta’s best young British novelists, among other distinctions. Waters lives in London.
Book in January – Said the Dead by Doireann Ní Ghríofa
In November 1896, a young doctor named Lucia Strangman walks through the door of a lunatic asylum, where she will devote many years to recording her patients’ lives in a series of thick casebooks. More than a century later, a stranger finds these crumbling volumes and devotes her own years to discovering what they reveal of human suffering and healing, of care and harm, of trauma, dread, love, and joy.
About the Author
Doireann Ní Ghríofa is an Irish writer devoted to exploring how the past makes itself felt within the present. Her novel 'A Ghost in the Throat’ won the James Tait Black Prize and was voted overall Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, while the US edition was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. It was translated into 20 further languages worldwide. Both history and ghost story, her next book, 'Said the Dead', distils hundreds of hours of archival research towards a polyphonic portrayal of a single institution.