This year marks 100 years since the partition of Ireland in 1921. In my novel The Sunken Road the characters are shaped by many of the tumultuous events commemorated by recent centenaries. After enduring the Somme, then the subsequent conflict at home, the protagonists find themselves at a crossroads on the new border between the two Irelands in June 1922. Can you really fall in love again with someone irrevocably changed by killing?

In the war of independence, combatants from both sides had been brutalised beforehand in the trenches. The book explores a world where men who had fought together against the Germans on the western front, now fight against each other in Ireland.

During two years of research and a lifetime of interest, the following 10 books were the ones that taught me the most about the politics, the history and most importantly the people of that time.

1. A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle
The first part of an epic trilogy, Henry Smart’s odyssey through crucial events in Irish history as he finds himself cast alongside its pivotal players, is a masterpiece of modern fiction. Spat into the slum tenements of Dublin then hardened with the rebels headquartered in the city’s General Post Office during the 1916 Easter Rising, Henry runs, kills, cycles and loves his way through revolutionary Ireland until he is forced to flee the very state he has helped to create. If you only ever read one book about Ireland, read this one.

2. Guests of the Nation by Frank O’Connor
Although a short story, in its 11 pages O’Connor tells us more about the savagery and cost of violence than many have managed in entire books. Told in the first person, this immediate tale of young IRA men having to execute two English prisoners whom they have come to know and like is as compelling as it is devastating.

3. Guerilla Days in Ireland by Tom Barry
As controversial today as when first published in 1946, Barry’s account of leading a flying column in Cork, including the ambush and killing of 18 Auxiliaries at Kilmichael, remains the most read of the personal accounts. Recently released records from Irish military service pension applications have cast doubt on some of Barry’s grander claims, but as a record of how the IRA worked in the field its value is irrefutable. The debate about whether injured crown forces at Kilmichael played dead then opened fire again, or perhaps were just finished off in cold blood, will outlive you and me.

4. The Shadow of a Gunman by Sean O’Casey
First performed at the Abbey theatre, Dublin, in 1923 while the civil war raged but set three years earlier during the war of independence, O’Casey’s play is a tragicomic fable of false heroism. Poet Donal Davoren’s neighbours have decided he’s an IRA hero hiding out in their tenement block. Minnie Powell has her heart set on the mystery man but events conspire and she ends up tragically losing her life to help the man she thinks she knows. It is an incredibly prescient study of the danger of romanticising violent nationalism, something that plagues Ireland to this day.

5. Women and the Irish Revolution by Linda Connolly
The most refreshing aspect of recent historical reflection has been the overdue acceptance and study of the huge role played by women in the period. Connolly examines diverse aspects of women’s experiences in the revolution after the Easter Rising. Their complex role as activists, the detrimental impact of violence and social and political divisions on them, and their part in the foundation of the new state. A state that would ultimately ignore the feminist and socialist ideals of the early revolution, leaving women to live essentially as second-class citizens in a conservative Catholic nation.

6. On Another Man’s Wound by Ernie O’Malley
Guerilla Days in Ireland may be the most famous personal account of the independence war, but this is the best, by a country mile. O’Malley’s journey around the counties of Ireland recruiting, training, then fighting alongside IRA men, is as brutal in its honesty as it is beautiful in its prose. The pages turn as easily as those of a good thriller and his observations of the countryside, the folklore and habits of the people slip seamlessly into the narrative. With the extra layer of intrigue added by his trips to Dublin to interact directly with the high command – O’Malley was on good personal terms with Michael Collins – the book is the all-round package. His recollection of commanding the execution of two English intelligence officers with whom he clearly had no personal beef haunted me long after I finished the book.

7. British Voices: From the Irish War of Independence by William Sheehan
Much like the empty void that is the German viewpoint in most British offerings on the second world war, in Ireland we tend to ignore the experience of the people we were fighting against. Balance is everything when reflecting on conflict, and Sheehan does a great job of collecting the letters, thoughts and emotions of many British combatants from the period and presenting them in a way that lets them speak for themselves.

8. Wounds: A Memoir of War and Love by Fergal Keane
Keane uses his skill as a journalist and experience as a war correspondent to immerse himself in the conflict in his native Co Kerry a century ago. The result tells the story of Keane’s grandmother, Hannah Purtill, her brother Mick and his friend Con Brosnan, and how they and their neighbours took up guns to fight the British empire. And it is the story of another Irishman, Tobias O’Sullivan, who fought against them as a policeman because he believed it was his duty to uphold the law of his country. Many of the people killed by the IRA were Royal Irish Constabulary officers brought up in the same communities as the men who would shoot them. Keane examines how one killing reverberated through a community and through the generations.

9. The Burnings 1920 by Pearse Lawlor
The majority of books examining this period overlook the violence in the north of Ireland or try to cast it as a separate issue. But everything that happened nationwide was intrinsically linked. Lawlor’s book specifically highlights some of those links. When the Sinn Féin mayor of Cork, Tomás Mac Curtain, was murdered in front of his family, the RIC inspector responsible, Oswald Swanzy, went into hiding at his mother’s in the north. It wasn’t long before IRA intelligence were on to him and six months later a squad from Cork assassinated Swanzy as he came out of church in Lisburn. The resulting anti-Catholic rampage led to widespread destruction and the mass movement of people as Catholics left areas they were no longer safe in.

10. Michael Collins by Tim Pat Coogan
Though it is clear that Coogan is a fan of his subject, he never loses balance and criticises Collins where he sees fit. The reason I’ve chosen this is as much for its general history of the period as its subject, undoubtedly the conflict’s most famous individual. Coogan portrays a complex man, who was undeniably ruthless, yet was also charismatic, intelligent and pragmatic.

• The Sunken Road by Ciarán McMenamin is published by Harvill Secker. To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com.