Joseph O'Connor's output is varied, including novels, a novella, a short-story collection, two plays, a biography, three works of prose nonfiction, a travelogue, and four screenplays. As a novelist, O'Connor's main themes are exile and family relationships. His work has been particularly successful in presenting the beliefs and values of a new generation of Irish men.

O'Connor's work has been written in a culture undergoing tremendous change and in which the certainties of the past are subject to revision. As critic Richard Kearney has suggested in his Transitions: Narratives in Modern Irish Culture (1988), "A central problem facing contemporary Irish culture is how to mediate between the images of past and future; how to avoid the petrification of tradition and the alienation of modernity." O'Connor's work may readily be located as part of what, in his Ireland's Literature: Selected Essays (1988), Terence Brown calls the "vital energy of contemporary Irish...