Some of the works were published in the United Kingdom under different titles. These are also noted after the American title.
Novels
- Blind Raftery and His Wife Hilaria (1924)
- Brother Saul (1928)
- Crusade (1928)
- Field of Honor (1929), or The Power of the Dog
- The Foolish Matrons (1920)
- Hangman's House (1926)
- Messr. Marco Polo (1921)
- O'Malley of Shanganagh (1925), or An Untitled Story
- A Party of Bacarat (1930), or The Golden Goat
- The Stranger's Banquet (1919)
- The Wind Bloweth (1922)
Short story collections
Doherty, 1997, provides a complete index of the short stories.
- An Alley of Flashing Spears, and Other Stories (1934)
- Changeling, and Other Stories (1923)
- A Daughter of the Medici, and Other Stories (1935)
- Destiny Bay (1928)
- The Hound of Ireland, and Other Stories (1935)
- The Island of Youth, and Other Stories (1933)
- Rivers of Damascus, and Other Stories (1931)
- Stories Without Women (And A Few With Women) (1915)
- A Woman of the Shee, and Other Stories (1932), or Saragasso Sea, and Other Stories
Poetry and Travelogue
- Ireland, The Rock Whence I Was Hewn (1929)
- Poems (1934)
The early novels can be said to be quite mediocre, noted as "potboilers" by Thurston Macauley, Byrne's earliest biographer. Polo tells the story of the Italian adventurer as told by an Irishman, and Wind is a romantic novel of the sea. Both show some highly lyrical passages intermixed with the plain language of real life. With Raftery, however, the author seems to reinvent the saga style, the prose breaking off into musical verse now and then as it tells the story of a blind poet wandering Ireland and avenging his wife's dishonor.
His later novels invited comparison with Irish novelist George Moore, especially in their romance and historical themes. It was with Hangman's, though, that he began to identify himself with the traditional Irish storytellers, noting in his preface ("A Foreword to Foreigner's") that: "I have written a book of Ireland for Irishmen. Some phrase, some name in it may conjure up the world they knew as children." It is also in this novel that Byrne returns to his Irish nationalist ideas by alluding to the ongoing strife of the Irish Civil War and fight for Independence.
Byrne was firmly of the neo-Romantic view of the mythical and pastoral beauty of Irish history. His writing hauntingly evokes these images, sometimes seeming want to preserve them. "It seemed to me," he says in Wind, "that I was capturing for an instant a beauty that was dying slowly, imperceptibly, but would soon be gone." his simple narrative style is rarely found today, and has the atmosphere of ancient oral epics such as
Taine Bo Cualinge and the
Epic of Gilgamesh.