Books by Nick Laird

Utterly Monkey: A Novel

by Nick Laird

Danny Williams didn't mean to be a lawyer, but somehow he is -- and for up to eighteen hours a day. He's well paid, home owning, and twenty-seven but is also overworked, lonely, and frequently stoned. The plan was to leave the troubles of a small town in Northern Ireland for the big city in England, but one evening an old school friend, Geordie, bursts into Danny's shiny new life. On the run from a Loyalist militia, Geordie brings everything Danny thought he had left behind and dumps it on his doorstep.
With infectious wit and energy to burn, Utterly Monkey is a searing, fiercely funny, and ultimately redemptive novel about surviving an office job, outwitting the bad guys, and, hopefully, getting the girl.

On Purpose: Poems

by Nick Laird

The much-anticipated new volume from award-winning poet Nick Laird, whose "superb lines" won praise from the New York Times Book Review. On Purpose examines the often brutal arena of human relations. Informed by both wit and a melancholic undercurrent, the book thoughtfully provokes concepts of happiness and sadness, of warring and reparation. The volume concludes with an affecting sequence about a marriage, inspired by that most influential of military treatises, The Art of War.

To a Fault: Poems

by Nick Laird

Winner of the 2005 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature; winner of the 2005 Ireland Chair for Poetry Award; the only poetry book long-listed for the Guardian First Book Award. "A confident hybrid of voices and styles tender and brilliant."Irish Times. Journeying between his native Ulster and his adopted London, Nick Laird balances ideas of home and flight, the need for belonging and the need to remain outside. Dexterous, fresh, and deft, To a Fault does "more, in its range and ambition, than any other first collection in at least the last ten years" (The Independent).

The Surprise

by Zadie Smith, Nick Laird

This back-to-school season, individuality is in! Nothing makes a splash like being uniquely yourself—and celebrating what makes you different.

From acclaimed authors Zadie Smith and Nick Laird, with art from exciting newcomer Magenta Fox, comes a powerful picture book debut!

"[A] delightful tale for little oddballs everywhere."—Entertainment Weekly

Meet Maud: a guinea pig who inexplicably wears a judo suit—and not everyone understands or approves. When Maud is thrown into a new and confusing situation, it takes brave decisions and serendipitous encounters for her to find her place and embrace her individuality.

The Surprise is an endearing story about the quiet power of being different by New York Times bestselling author Zadie Smith and award-winning writer Nick Laird, and introduces an exciting debut illustrator, Magenta Fox. Together they have created a picture book that adults and children alike will treasure.

Glover's Mistake

by Nick Laird

From a rising British novelist, an artful meditation on love and life in contemporary London

When David Pinner introduces his former teacher, the American artist Ruth Marks, to his friend and flatmate James Glover, he unwittingly sets in place a love triangle loaded with tension, guilt, and heartbreak. As David plays reluctant witness (and more) to James and Ruth's escalating love affair, he must come to terms with his own blighted emotional life. Set in the London art scene awash with new money and intellectual pretension, in the sleek galleries and posh restaurants of a Britannia resurgent with cultural and economic power, Nick Laird's insightful and drolly satirical novel vividly portrays three people whose world gradually fractures along the ineluctable fault lines of desire, truth, deceit, and jealousy. With wit, compassion, and acuity, Laird explores the very nature of contemporary romance-"The Death of Love in Modern Culture," as David puts it in one of his dyspeptic blog posts-among damaged souls whose hearts and heads never quite line up long enough for them to achieve true happiness.

Up Late: Poems

by Nick Laird

One of NPR's "Books We Love" in 2023

Acclaimed poet Nick Laird reflects on the strange and chaotic times we live in with singular precision, clarity, and daring.
Reeling in the face of collapsing systems, of politics, identity, and the banalities and distortions of modern living, Nick Laird confronts age-old anxieties, questions of aloneness, friendship, the push and pull of daily life. These poems transport us from a clifftop in Ireland’s County Cork to a bench in New York’s Washington Square, from a face-off between Freud and Michelangelo’s Moses to one between the poet and a squirrel in a London garden.
At the book’s heart lies the Forward Prize–winning title sequence, a profound meditation on a father’s dying at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. The reverberations of this knockout poem echo through the volume in its interrogations of inheritance and legacy, illness and justice, accounts of what is lost and what, if anything, can be retained. Amid rage, grief, and the conflagration of reality, Laird finds tenderness in the moments of connection that grow between the cracks and offers glimpses into the unadulterated world of childhood, where everything is still at stake and infinite.
Astonishing in its emotional range and intellect, Up Late is a powerful volume from an “exceptionally gifted poet” (Paul Muldoon, Times Literary Supplement).

Up Late: Poems

by Nick Laird

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In the Wild

by Zadie Smith, Nick Laird, David Elliott

The stellar team who brought us ON THE FARM present a companion book evoking creatures of the wild in simple, clever poems and vibrant woodcuts. (Ages 4-7)

From the lion standing alone on the African savannah to the panda in a bamboo forest, from the rhinoceros with its boot-like face to the Arctic polar bear disappearing in the snow, the earth is full of curious and wonderful animals, each more extraordinary than the next. David Elliott's pithy, lyrical verse and Holly Meade's stunning woodcut and watercolor illustrations reveal a world of remarkable beauty and wonder --and offer an enticing introduction to both favorite animals and poetic forms.

In the Wild

by Zadie Smith, Nick Laird, David Elliott

Acclaimed authors Zadie Smith and Nick Laird are back with a brand-new picture book about conquering new experiences and enjoying the great outdoors!

Maud—the judo-suit-wearing guinea pig and proud oddball—is off into the wild, as is Kit, her owner. Both are slightly nervous about what they’ll find in the great outdoors, but with a pinch of bravery—and a few Signature Moves—they’ll make new friends and explore new worlds . . .

A warm and endearing story celebrating the quiet power of being yourself.

Feel Free: Poems

by Nick Laird

Shortlisted for the 2018 T. S. Eliot Prize

“Nick Laird’s dazzling poems arrive with a kind of revolutionary candor; a truth-telling that’s political, existential, and above all, emotional.… Feel Free is essential poetry.”―Terrance Hayes
Feel Free, the fourth collection from acclaimed poet Nick Laird, effortlessly marries the acoustic expansiveness of Whitman or Ashbery with the lyricism of Laird’s forebears Heaney, MacNeice, and Yeats. With characteristic variety, invention, and wit, Laird explores the patterns of freedom and constraint―the family, the impress of history, the body itself―and how we might transcend them. Always daring, always renewing, Feel Free is Laird’s most remarkable work to date.

Go Giants: Poems

by Nick Laird

An inventive new collection by the writer whom Colm Tóibín called “an assured and brilliant voice in Irish poetry.” Go Giants, Nick Laird’s stunning third volume of poetry, is full of "epic ambition." In a collection that’s "easily his most accomplished to date…[Laird] gives everything of himself in a poetry as expansive and thought-provoking as his considered response to an infinitely complicated universe needs it to be" (The Guardian). Laird boldly engages with topics ranging from fatherhood and marriage to mass destruction and the cosmos. Go Giants is a brash, brave, and wildly imaginative new collection.
From Go Giants:
Go in peace to love and serve the.
Go and get help. Go directly to jail.
Go down in flames. Go up in smoke.
Go for broke. Go tell Aunt Rhody.
Go tell the Spartans. Go to hell.
Go into detail. Go for the throat.

Modern Gods: A Novel

by Nick Laird

A powerful novel about two sisters who must reclaim themselves after their lives are dramatically upended, from an award-winning author with “a wonderfully original and limber voice” (The New York Times)

“[Nick Laird’s] kinetic prose, full of insight about politics, history and religion, dazzles eye and ear." –The New York Times Book Review

“Nick Laird takes two experiences poles apart and unites them in gorgeous language…[with] fierce tenderness. ” –Dave Eggers, author of Heroes of the Frontier

Alison Donnelly has suffered for love. Still stuck in the small Northern Irish town where she was born, working for her father’s real estate agency, she hopes a second marriage will help her get her life back together. Her sister Liz, a fiercely independent professor who lives in New York City, is about to return to Ulster for Alison’s wedding, before heading to an island off the coast of Papua New Guinea to make a TV show about the world’s newest religion.

Both sisters hope to write their own futures, but the past has other ideas. Alison wakes up the day after her wedding to find that her new husband has a past neither of them can escape. While Liz, in a rainforest on the other side of the planet, finds herself increasingly entangled in the eerie, charged world of Belef, the charismatic middle-aged woman she has come to film, the leader of a cargo cult.

As Modern Gods ingeniously interweaves the stories of Liz and Alison, it becomes clear that both sisters must learn how to negotiate with the past, with the sins of fanaticism, and decide exactly what the living owe to the dead. Laird’s brave, innovative novel charts the intimacies and disappointments of a family trying to hold itself together, and the repercussions of history and belief.

Modern Gods

by Nick Laird

A powerful novel about two sisters who must reclaim themselves after their lives are dramatically upended, from an award-winning author with "a wonderfully original and limber voice" (The New York Times)

"[Nick Laird's] kinetic prose, full of insight about politics, history and religion, dazzles eye and ear." -The New York Times Book Review

"Nick Laird takes two experiences poles apart and unites them in gorgeous language...[with] fierce tenderness. " -Dave Eggers, author of Heroes of the Frontier

Alison Donnelly has suffered for love. Still stuck in the small Northern Irish town where she was born, working for her father's real estate agency, she hopes a second marriage will help her get her life back together. Her sister Liz, a fiercely independent professor who lives in New York City, is about to return to Ulster for Alison's wedding, before heading to an island off the coast of Papua New Guinea to make a TV show about the world's newest religion.

Both sisters hope to write their own futures, but the past has other ideas. Alison wakes up the day after her wedding to find that her new husband has a past neither of them can escape. While Liz, in a rainforest on the other side of the planet, finds herself increasingly entangled in the eerie, charged world of Belef, the charismatic middle-aged woman she has come to film, the leader of a cargo cult.

As Modern Gods ingeniously interweaves the stories of Liz and Alison, it becomes clear that both sisters must learn how to negotiate with the past, with the sins of fanaticism, and decide exactly what the living owe to the dead. Laird's brave, innovative novel charts the intimacies and disappointments of a family trying to hold itself together, and the repercussions of history and belief.