Dublin has never been a place easily reduced to a single story. Developed as a Viking settlement, it became the difficult second city of the British Empire – a colonial capital that served empire rather than nation. For centuries it strained to rival London; later it struggled to define itself apart from it. Yet today it stands as an increasingly multicultural global city with a rich literary past.

The Shortest History of Dublin explores that restless inheritance – the ways in which Dublin remembers, forgets and remakes itself. It shows how Dublin's truest identity endures in the words of its greatest writers, from the likes of Joyce and Yeats to modern authors Roddy Doyle, Anne Enright, Sebastian Barry and Sally Rooney. And that the challenge of this city of music, writing, architecture and craic is to balance change with character, growth with memory.