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Elizabeth Day talks to Lisa McInerney and Lucy Caldwell, two young writers born in the same year but from different sides of the Irish border. 100 years since partition, they discuss how a literary culture once defined by exile and sectarian identities is being reconfigured in exciting new ways today.

Dedications and acknowledgements in books offer fascinating insights into authors' self-fashioning and desires to ingratiate themselves with certain readers. Professor Adam Smyth explains how what seems like an a new trend actually goes back to the time of Virgil.

And US author Mary Gaitskill choses Flaubert's Madame Bovary as a book she'd never lend - a novel which coincidentally was dedicated to the lawyer who defended at an obscenity trial after the depiction of adultery scandalised 19th century France.

Book List – Sunday 23 May and Thursday 27 May

The Rules of Revelation by Lisa McInerney
The Glorious Heresies by Lisa McInerney
The Blood Miracles by Lisa McInerney
Being Various: New Irish Short Stories edited by Lucy Caldwell
Multitudes by Lucy Caldwell
Intimacies by Lucy Caldwell
Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín
A Belfast Woman by Mary Beckett
A Literary Woman by Mary Beckett
Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
Book Parts edited by Dennis Duncan and Adam Smyth
Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Wild Fire by Nelson DeMille
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne
Bad Behaviour by Mary Gaitskill
Because They Wanted To by Mary Gaitskill
Two Girls, Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert