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Interviews

“This is my most personal novel yet”: Donal Ryan on Strange Flowers

Donal Ryan on his brush with Traveller magic

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Features

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A Conversation with Donal Ryan

The Spinning Heart

THE STUNNING FIRST NOVEL BY THE AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF HEART BE AT PEACE AND WHERE ARE THE KINGS<ul><li>Winner of the Guardian First Book Award </li><li>Shortlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Literary Award </li><li>Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize</li><li>Winner of Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards</li><li>Winner of the European Prize for Literature </li><li>Voted Irish Book of the Decade in 2016</li><li>Voted top 20 Irish Books of last 20 years 2026</li></ul> 
“My father still lives back the road past the weir in the cottage I was reared in. I go there every day to see is he dead and every day he lets me down. He hasn’t yet missed a day of letting me down.” 
 
Now winner of six Irish Book Awards and a No.1 bestselling author, Donal Ryan exploded on to the literary scene with his stunning debut, set in the aftermath of Ireland’s financial collapse. When dangerous tensions surface in a small Irish town, the characters face a battle between their public persona and inner desires. Told through a chorus of twenty-one unique voices, each struggling to tell their own kind of truth, a single authentic tale unfolds. 
 
The Spinning Heart speaks for contemporary Ireland like no other novel. Wry, vulnerable, all-too human, it captures the language and spirit of rural Ireland and, with uncanny perception, articulates the words and thoughts of a generation. 
 
Covers may vary 
 
Discover Donal Ryan's new novel, WHERE ARE THE KINGS, out now. 
 
**** 
 
'Filled with light and shade, love and tragedy ... if it was a song you could sing it' ANNE ENRIGHT 
 
'Donal Ryan is the real deal ... a brilliantly realised, utterly resonant state-of-the-nation landscape' SUNDAY INDEPENDENT 
 
'I can't imagine a more original, more perceptive or more passionate work than this. Outstanding' JOHN BOYNE 
 
'It's furious, it's moving, it's darkly funny, it punches you right in the gut' NEW YORK TIMES 
 
'Funny, moving and beautifully written' EDNA O'BRIEN 
 
'The unambiguous announcement of a genuine and apparently fully-formed new talent' FINANCIAL TIMES

Donal Ryan, from Nenagh, County Tipperary, has published seven number one bestselling novels and a short story collection. He has won several awards for his fiction, including the European Union Prize for Literature, the Guardian First Book Award and six Irish Book Awards, and has been shortlisted for several more, including the Costa Book Award and the Dublin International Literary Award. He was nominated for the Booker Prize in 2013 for his debut novel, The Spinning Heart, and again in 2018, for his fourth novel, From A Low and Quiet Sea. The Spinning Heart was voted Irish Book of the Decade in 2016. In 2021 Donal became the first Irish writer to be awarded the Jean Monnet Prize for European Literature. His most recent novel, Heart Be at Peace, won both Novel of the Year and Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, and was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Nero Book Awards. His work has been adapted for stage and screen and translated into over twenty languages. Donal has lectured in Creative Writing at the University of Limerick since 2014 and lives in Castletroy with his wife Anne Marie and their two children.

THE STUNNING FIRST NOVEL BY THE AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF HEART BE AT PEACE AND WHERE ARE THE KINGS 
<ul><li>Winner of the Guardian First Book Award </li><li>Shortlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Literary Award </li><li>Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize</li><li>Winner of Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards</li><li>Winner of the European Prize for Literature </li><li>Voted Irish Book of the Decade in 2016</li><li>Voted top 20 Irish Books of last 20 years 2026</li></ul> 
“My father still lives back the road past the weir in the cottage I was reared in. I go there every day to see is he dead and every day he lets me down. He hasn’t yet missed a day of letting me down.” 
 
Now winner of six Irish Book Awards and a No.1 bestselling author, Donal Ryan exploded on to the literary scene with his stunning debut, set in the aftermath of Ireland’s financial collapse. When dangerous tensions surface in a small Irish town, the characters face a battle between their public persona and inner desires. Told through a chorus of twenty-one unique voices, each struggling to tell their own kind of truth, a single authentic tale unfolds. 
 
The Spinning Heart speaks for contemporary Ireland like no other novel. Wry, vulnerable, all-too human, it captures the language and spirit of rural Ireland and, with uncanny perception, articulates the words and thoughts of a generation. 
 
Covers may vary 
 
Discover Donal Ryan's new novel, WHERE ARE THE KINGS, out now. 
 
**** 
 
'Filled with light and shade, love and tragedy ... if it was a song you could sing it' ANNE ENRIGHT 
 
'Donal Ryan is the real deal ... a brilliantly realised, utterly resonant state-of-the-nation landscape' SUNDAY INDEPENDENT 
 
'I can't imagine a more original, more perceptive or more passionate work than this. Outstanding' JOHN BOYNE 
 
'It's furious, it's moving, it's darkly funny, it punches you right in the gut' NEW YORK TIMES 
 
'Funny, moving and beautifully written' EDNA O'BRIEN 
 
'The unambiguous announcement of a genuine and apparently fully-formed new talent' FINANCIAL TIMES

Heart, Be at Peace

Donal Ryan’s writing has earned him a place among the greatest names in Irish literature and this lyrical novel speaks to the very heart of modern Irish society

An astute mosaic. Add to that Ryan’s gift for capturing the foolishness and fakery of human nature and the lyrical power of Irish small-town gossip . . . and you have a portrait of modern Ireland through a series of hard minds and sometimes kind hearts

Ryan dives deep into his characters’ hopes and grievances, drawing out their voices with such precision that you can almost hear their breath between words . . . With any luck we will be back in this small place of vast intrigue to pick up with its people again a decade from now.

[The novel is] a kind of simulacrum of life, as if we have been landed in this village, have a chance to overhear its inhabitants’ most private thoughts, move from one house to another, sit in the pub, discover who believes who is to blame for what, and what can be excused or forgiven

This beautiful and moving novel, told in 21 voices, serves up heartbreak and hope in equal measure.

It's all there. Donal&rsquo;s trademark big heart and understanding of what it is to be human, all of it on the page and somehow beyond it. I loved it from the first page to the last &hellip; there are more moments of genius in this book than I care to mention. Beautiful ... a book full of love and hope, more needed in these days than ever.

Any new book by Donal Ryan is something to celebrate and Heart, Be at Peace is no exception. He is a powerful story teller immersed in all the intricacies of human relationships, and once again he brings us a novel with a heart as big as the community he describes. Clear-eyed, deeply ambitious, sharp, lyrical as always, by turns funny and terrifying, Donal Ryan shines his light in the darkest corners, and finds something for us to love. I am blown away by the ambition and scope of this exquisite piece of writing: Heart, Be at Peace is sublime in both its sentiment and beauty.

Rachel Joyce, author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

This is Donal Ryan at his most assured, moving deftly between voices, fully inhabiting every character, breaking his poor readers' hearts. Every chapter's a tiny epic. Every sentence seems to sing. Ryan's writing is both of the moment and utterly timeless in its ability to capture the essence of what it means to be alive, to love, to grieve and cling to hope.

Ryan gives each a distinct voice and a rhythm to their thoughts

My book of the year is Donal Ryan's Heart, Be at Peace … Is it possible to say a work of fiction is true? Well, this is and once again, it's a book that stays with you well beyond the last page

Donal Ryan's Heart, Be at Peace is enthralling. He captures such a range of emotion, defiance, eloquence, crudity and dark humour, in brilliant prose that makes him stand out

Every novel by Donal Ryan extends his deserved reputation. I adored his Heart, Be at Peace.

The vibrancy, the dirt-under-the-nails intimacies he unearths, the recognition of primal forces in building or sundering family and/or community relationships, the susceptibilities of the unhappy and unfulfilled are brought together in a way that inspires and intimidates in equal measure . . For me, [Donal Ryan] is the greatest current Irish writer

This wonderful, upliftingly good, this tremendously well-constructed novel secures [Donal Ryan's] place at the very top table of Irish novelists. Probably among all novelists working in English, too. Yes, it is that good.

Ryan’s sentences gleam, peeling the calloused skin of machismo to expose the vulnerabilities of his men, cutting against our expectations . . . Heart, Be at Peace moves with the lightness and felicity of a story collection, sifting relationships built on sand, pummeled by tides of human folly

[A] powerful novel . . . The collective effect of [the characters'] intimate, first-person narratives is that of a confessional, revealing the psyche of a country going through a traumatic change.

Ryan is always deeply engaged by the way the fortunes of 21st-century Ireland impact directly on his characters: the financial emergency that afflicted this small town may have faded, but new troubles – opportunities, to some – have arisen to take their place. Ryan deftly interweaves a larger sense of danger, and an understanding of Ireland’s history, with domestic concerns.

Donal Ryan’s slim, shapeshifting Heart, Be at Peace is a wonder... Ryan’s sentences gleam, peeling the calloused skin of machismo to expose the vulnerabilities of his men, cutting against our expectations... Heart, Be at Peace moves with the lightness and felicity of a story collection, 
sifting relationships built on sand, pummelled by tides of human folly.

Ryan’s eloquent tale explores how contemporary problems — social media, drugs — affect a small town in rural Ireland. The story emerges slowly, as each character contributes a confessional strand to the tangled connections among them.

WINNER OF THE IRISH BOOK OF THE YEAR 
WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR FICTION 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE NERO NOVEL OF THE YEAR 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE KERRY GROUP IRISH NOVEL OF THE YEAR 
THE No.1 IRISH TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
'My book of the year...full of love and hope, more needed in these days than ever' Kit de Waal 
 
'Donal Ryan’s writing has earned him a place among the greatest names in Irish literature' Maria Dickenson, Chair of the IBA judges 
 
'I am blown away by the ambition and scope of this exquisite piece of writing.' Rachel Joyce 
 
*** 
 
Some things can send a heart spinning; others will crack it in two... 
 
In a small town in rural Ireland, the local people have weathered the storms of economic collapse and are looking towards the future. The jobs are back, the dramas of the past seemingly lulled, and although the town bears the marks of its history, new stories are unfolding. 
 
But a fresh menace is creeping around the lakeshore and the lanes of the town, and the peace of the community is about to be shattered in an unimaginable way. Young people are being drawn towards the promise of fast money whilst the generation above them tries to push back the tide of an enemy no one can touch… 
 
Told in twenty-one voices, Heart, be at Peace is a heartfelt, lyrical novel that can be read independently, or as a companion to Donal Ryan’s multi-award-winning novel, The Spinning Heart, voted ‘The Irish Book of the Decade’. 
 
***** 
 
PRAISE FOR DONAL RYAN: 
 
'One of the finest novelists writing today.' RACHEL JOYCE 
 
'His paragraphs are unnoticeably beautiful, his heart always on show' ANNE ENRIGHT 
 
'Endlessly surprising and incredibly moving' DAVID NICHOLLS 
 
'A life-enhancing talent' SEBASTIAN BARRY 
 
'I would struggle to think of any other Irish author working today who writes with as much compassion as Donal Ryan' LOUISE O'NEILL 
 
'Beautiful, compassionate...Donal Ryan at his inimitable best.' MAGGIE O'FARRELL 
 
'Beautifully poised, sad, poetic and human....I loved every single line.' IAN RANKIN 
 
'The prose drips like honey off a spoon' SUNDAY TIMES 
 
 
Nero Book Awards Shortlisted, 2024 
An Post Book Awards, November and December 2024 
Irish Times bestseller, August 2024

The Queen of Dirt Island

This is a generous mosaic of a novel about the staying power of love and pride and history and family. While Donal Ryan is never afraid of "all the meanness and sorrow of the world," he also manages to excavate the thrilling beauties that hold us together. He manages, with wit and grace, to illuminate the anonymous corners of human experience and get at the underworld of our souls.

Donal Ryan is one of the finest novelists writing today and this is a gem of a novel. Full of humanity, humility, humour, drama and mystery, his characters are so vivid you feel they are sitting outside, waiting for him to conjure them to life. He writes with grace and precision, with love indeed, about who we are and why, about family history and the ghosts we carry. A haunting, exquisite masterpiece.

From its opening pages, this book exerts a quiet, propulsive hold over its reader. The three generations of Aylward women will break your heart and then put it back together again. It's a beautiful, compassionate novel - Donal Ryan at his inimitable best.

Beautifully poised, sad, poetic and human....I loved every single line.

I truly enjoyed The Queen Of Dirt Island from its jolting first chapter to its calm, graceful conclusion. Now I'm on to Strange Flowers.

Ryan's writing is so musical, so easily heard, that your eyes will dance through its pages.

'[A] master storyteller. The most vivid characters, so full of life. You read each short chapter wondering how he's crammed in so much heart and wonder, while the story itself ramps up to its quietly devastating and marvellous conclusion.'

'Donal Ryan repeatedly broke my heart and then soldered it back together with words of molten gold. The Queen of Dirt Island is a powerful tribute to mothers in all of their ferocity, tenderness and guilt. I loved this book with my whole patchwork heart. Eloquent, beautiful and threaded throughout with a joyful savage humour, a privilege to read, and re-read.'

I was thunderstruck by this exquisitely beautiful and powerful novel. This is writing of shimmering truthfulness, empathy and authority by the most consistently brilliant Irish writer of his generation.

The Queen of Dirt Island is the work of a master writer in full flow. Donal Ryan is uncommonly perceptive at finding greatness in humanity's goodness. This is his best novel yet.

Donal Ryan makes writing look effortless. He manages to capture the world and all its broken beauty in one tiny corner of Ireland. His characters feel like people you've always known. His words seem to sing off the page.

Simply sumptuous...This soaring tale of four generations of women in a small Irish town is bursting with humour and pathos. The Queen of Dirt Island contains shocking twists, deaths, reflections on how fiction misappropriates lives and a sharp portrait of how love can lift and twist the human heart....glorious.

In gorgeous, graceful prose, Donal Ryan tells the story of four generations of women in this tender, joyful gem of a novel.

An endlessly surprising story of the heart's secret places, and what we hide there... This magnificent novel confirms Donal Ryan is a writer of rare and precious vision: he sees the world as it ought to be, and dares you to believe in it.

A stunning portrayal of intergenerational family love and the complications of the human condition. I was swept up in the world of the Aylward women: in their power and pain and mostly, in their fierce resilience. A novel full of compassion and honesty, where love triumphs. The prose is pitch perfect.

Hymn to the warp and woof of life; celebration of the flip-flop way of family; soaring testimony to the endurance of the human spirit. And all delivered with his trademark compassion, empathy, humour and brio. A gift of a book.

Big-hearted, generous and brimful of emotion, this is a gorgeous, life-enhancing novel.

Ryan's writing is like poetry and he has a real gift for creating characters who live in full technicolour. Highly recommend

In Ryan's hands the mundane and the everyday is transformed into a thing of beauty, thrumming with significance.

Tender with comic observation ... a topsy-turvy emotional rollercoaster

Exquisitely rendered. It reads like musical sounds, full of light and lilting melody...it's funny and sad, and sparks with the most tremendous, tart, wit.

The characters are compelling and vividly drawn, the dialogue is profane and frequently hilarious; the prose drips like honey off a spoon.

A jewel of a novel that will surely become a classic... enthralling and unmissable

DAILY EXPRESS, 'Fiction Highlights of 2022'

A celebration of love and loyalty among women.

Big-hearted, generous and brimful of emotion, this a gorgeous, life-enhancing read

It is a beaut. It's a celebration of women and of womanhood. I see my mother in this, I see my sister ... This book is a joy.

If language - lyric, lovely and funny, steeped in County Tipperary - and women (men come and go, rarely center a chapter and are often useless, sometimes cruel) are of no interest to you, The Queen of Dirt Island is not your next read. Ryan's book is a celebration, in an embroidered, unrestrained, joyful, aphoristic and sometimes profane style, of both ... The Queen of Dirt Island gives the women their due, and the reader is rewarded.

Donal Ryan's The Queen of Dirt Island is a little Irish miracle ... there's as much implicit wisdom in these pages about how to live as how to write ... Ryan has his own emotional range and a way of capturing the largeness of what look like tiny lives but aren't

Discover the emotional, bestselling novel about four generations of women and the stories that bind them, from the Booker longlisted author Of Strange Flowers. 
 
'One of the finest novelists writing today... a haunting, exquisite masterpiece.' RACHEL JOYCE 
 
'Endlessly surprising and incredibly moving' DAVID NICHOLLS 
 
'Beautiful, compassionate ... Donal Ryan at his inimitable best.' MAGGIE O'FARRELL 
 
___________ 
 
The Aylward women are mad about each other, but you wouldn't always think it. 
 
You'd have to know them - in spite of what neighbours might say about raised voices and dramatic scenes - to know that that their house is a place of peace, filled with love, a refuge from the sadness and cruelty of the world. 
 
The head of the family, Nana, is a woman who has buried two sons and whose life has been the family farm. 
 
Her daughter-in-law, Eileen, is estranged from her own parents, having 'shamed' them and given birth to Saoirse. 
 
And then there's Saoirse herself, eavesdropping on lives she cannot comprehend. 
 
It is only when they must battle for the inheritance of Dirt Island - a narrow strip of land adjacent to Eileen's childhood home - that they truly understand the roots that bind their lives together. 
 
_________ 
 
'The prose drips like honey off a spoon' SUNDAY TIMES 
 
'Beautifully poised, sad, poetic and human....I loved every single line.' IAN RANKIN 
 
'A generous mosaic of a novel about the staying power of love and pride and history and family' COLUM McCANN 
 
'His paragraphs are unnoticeably beautiful, his heart always on show' ANNE ENRIGHT 
 
'A life-enhancing talent' SEBASTIAN BARRY 
 
'I would struggle to think of any other Irish author working today who writes with as much compassion as Donal Ryan' LOUISE O'NEILL

Strange Flowers

The extraordinary story of a family devastated by a sudden disappearance and transformed by a miraculous return from the award-winning author loved by David Nicholls, Kamila Shamsie and Sebastian Barry.

Winner of the An Post Irish Novel of the Year 2020 
Longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award 
 
'You have to truly love people to write like this' RACHEL JOYCE 
 
'One of the greatest novels of this century' SUNDAY INDEPENDENT 
 
'Gorgeously wrought' GUARDIAN 
 
 
In 1973, twenty-year-old Moll Gladney takes a morning bus from her rural home and disappears. 
 
Bewildered and distraught, Paddy and Kit must confront an unbearable prospect: that they will never see their daughter again. 
 
Five years later, Moll returns. What - and who - she brings with her will change the course of her family's life forever. 
 
Beautiful and devastating, this exploration of loss, alienation and the redemptive power of love reaffirms Donal Ryan as one of the most talented and empathetic writers at work today. 
 
_________ 
 
'Outstanding ... Tender and beautifully written' INDEPENDENT 
 
'All the beauty and sorrow of life can be found in these pages' KATHLEEN MACMAHON 
 
'Exquisite . . . Beautiful' ANNE GRIFFIN, author of WHEN ALL IS SAID 
 
'Ryan gathers together the fragments of broken lives and makes us something new and beautiful from them' RÓNÁN HESSION, author of LEONARD AND HUNGRY PAUL

Here is love as a weapon and a balm. Love as faith, fate and redemption ... a gorgeously wrought book - compassionate without dissolving into nostalgia

Endlessly surprising and incredibly moving

A triumph ... Ryan slowly and beautifully reveals the way that even broken people can open the door fully to the truth of themselves

His moving story of love and loss deserves to win a host of awards. It's an outstanding read

I think you have to truly love people to write like this

A triumph of quiet but devastating power, by some distance the best novel I've read so far this year

A big-hearted, beautiful work of art, full of truth and intensity

Classic Ryan; poignant and atmospheric storytelling ... quiet but intermittently explosive

I knew Donal Ryan's latest would be good and I was right - it's a risky act of imagination that works, and the sentences are as beautiful as ever

The lyricism of Ryan's prose, laced with compassion, is astonishing

With each new novel Donal Ryan's ink seems to sink deeper into the page. In Strange Flowers he gathers together the fragments of broken lives and makes us something new and beautiful from them

Rónán Hession, author of Leonard and Hungry Paul

A book so exquisite in its language it pushes me to want to write better ... you will love the quiet world of Paddy &amp; Kit Gladney and all it is their daughter Moll brings to their door. Beautiful

A beautiful, almost unbearably moving novel. Donal Ryan's compassion shines through every word he writes

This is a novel to savour, for its mastery of language, its power of storytelling and its sure hand as it covers the sweep of time. Irish fiction was in a great place already, but Donal Ryan has gone and raised the bar again. All the beauty and sorrow of life can be found in these pages

The lyricism of the prose can be pitch perfect, placing Ryan among the great writers of rural Ireland such as John McGahern and Mary Lavin

It is the sweetest, gentlest story of love ... each character so tenderly evoked

Ryan's beautifully written story reads like coming home and is a breath of fresh air

Tender and beautifully written ... We read this outstanding book in one sitting and will definitely return to it again

Beautifully observed Tipperary setting and tenderly created characters telling a story of loss and redemption ... Love permeates Ryan's work

A master with the written world and who has an insight into the Irish psyche which is not only stunning, but is hard to touch with a flame

The slim novel belies its size by packing in a whole world of exploration of social class, gender, sexuality, race, parenthood, and religion. For all its scope, nothing is shoehorned in. It's all naturally and gently explored

One of the greatest Irish novels of this century so far

A brilliant and ambitious addition to a body of work from an author who is inevitably, and seemingly effortlessly, writing his way into the pantheon of great Irish novelists

Ryan reaffirms his place amongst Ireland's greatest wordsmiths ... This is a book which more than justifies the hype that accompanies it

A novel carried by deep feeling and great empathy

The writing is so exquisite, the dialogue so authentic, the sympathy so deep

Ryan's love of people pours from every page

One of the standout books for me this year. He's a master of the craft and has written a family story with humanity and warmth, turning sentence after sentence to die for

A lovingly crafted story that draws you in, gets under the skin and will resonate long after

The Thing About December

Brilliantly realized and deeply moving second novel from the author of the award-winning The Spinning Heart.

A force of nature ... a life-enhancing talent

His paragraphs are unnoticeably beautiful, his heart always on show, and he writes with a social accuracy that is devastating

Compelling and heartbreaking . . beautiful, yet simple and utterly convincing

Cements Ryan as the sharpest chronicler of modern Irish life

Painfully moving ... Ryan’s work has set a benchmark to which other writers will aspire.

A powerful and touching meditation on loneliness and isolation . . . Ryan continues to establish himself as an important voice in recording contemporary Ireland.

Powerful . . . Ryan is clearly committed to his subject and possesses the insight and empathy to illuminate the heart of the matter.

Ryan is a remarkably good chronicler of contemporary Irish life

Ryan holds you to the page by the sheer force of his language ... If you’re interested in the state of Irish fiction now, pick up a copy of this book.

Displaying again his exceptional gift for pinning a voice to the page, Ryan transforms Johnsey’s self-torturing internal soundtrack into something that’ll have you alternately cringing, cheering and laughing.

Ryan’s urgent, poetic prose captures the internal distress of his main character with forensic intensity. . . . a testament to this brightest of new writing talents. . . . Ryan has risen to the challenge of his second novel admirably. Recommended.

Powerful writing that certainly cements Ryan’s status as the newly crowned king of what the Irish Times has dubbed “recession lit”.

From the twice Man Booker longlisted author of From a Low and Quiet Sea 
 
'A force of nature ... a life-enhancing talent' SEBASTIAN BARRY 
 
 
While the Celtic Tiger rages, and greed becomes the norm, Johnsey Cunliffe desperately tries to hold on to the familiar, even as he loses those who all his life have protected him from a harsh world. Village bullies and scheming land-grabbers stand in his way, no matter where he turns. 
 
Set over the course of one year of Johnsey's life, The Thing About December breathes with his grief, bewilderment, humour and agonizing self-doubt. This is a heart-twisting tale of a lonely man struggling to make sense of a world moving faster than he is. 
 
Donal Ryan's award-winning debut, The Spinning Heart, garnered unprecedented acclaim, and The Thing About December confirms his status as one of the best writers of his generation. 
 
_________ 
 
'His paragraphs are unnoticeably beautiful, his heart always on show, and he writes with a social accuracy that is devastating' ANNE ENRIGHT 
 
'Compelling and heartbreaking . . beautiful, yet simple and utterly convincing' SUNDAY TIMES 
 
'Painfully moving ... Ryan's work has set a benchmark to which other writers will aspire' JOHN BOYNE, IRISH TIMES 
 
'Cements Ryan as the sharpest chronicler of modern Irish life' ESQUIRE

A Slanting of the Sun: Stories

Eagerly anticipated first collection of short stories from the author of The Spinning Heart and The Thing About December

From the twice Man Booker longlisted author of From a Low and Quiet Sea 
 
'Donal Ryan, one of our most remarkable writers, has produced a book of short stories of such visceral power that they hit you in the solar plexus. He deals with the dark side of modern Irish life and produces sentences of titanic impact.' IRISH MAIL ON SUNDAY 
 
 
An old man looks into the fearful eyes of a burglar left to guard him while his brother is beaten; an Irish priest in a war-torn Syrian town teaches its young men the art of hurling; the driver of a car which crashed, killing a teenage girl, forges a connection with the girl's mother; a squad of broken friends assemble to take revenge on a rapist; a young man sets off on his morning run, reflecting on the ruins of his relationship, but all is not as it seems. 
 
Donal Ryan's short stories pick up where his acclaimed novels The Spinning Heart and The Thing About December left off, dealing with the human cost of loneliness, isolation and displacement. Sometimes this is present in the ordinary, the mundane; sometimes it is triggered by a fateful encounter or a tragic decision. At the heart of these stories, crucially, is how people are drawn to each other and cling on to love, often in desperate circumstances. 
 
In haunting and often startling prose, Donal Ryan has captured the brutal beauty of the human heart in all its hopes and failings. 
 
_________ 
 
'Donal Ryan is a heartbreaker, his quicksilver prose laced with ... wistful rhythms ... These breathtaking stories explore human love against an uneasy landscape of violence and desperation... Donal finds hope in dark corners.' DAILY MAIL 
 
'Donal Ryan is a master of the magnetic first line ... His faithful subject is rural despair; the poetry of adversity, the baffling fortitude of intrinsically decent people ... This collection shows Ryan adding his own elastic yet distinctive voice to O'Connor's impeccable tradition.' GUARDIAN

All We Shall Know

The searing novel from the author of The Spinning Heart, The Thing About December and From a Low and Quiet Sea

From the twice Man Booker longlisted author of From a Low and Quiet Sea 
 
'Poetic, powerful and heart-rending' THE TIMES 
 
'An exquisite account of womanhood, friendship, prejudice and tradition that is both intimate in scale and awesome in achievement' IRISH INDEPENDENT 
 
 
Melody Shee is alone and in trouble. Her husband doesn't take her news too well. She can't tell her father yet because he's a good man and this could break him. She's trying to stay in the moment, but the future is looming - larger by the day - while the past won't let her go. What she did to Breedie Flynn all those years ago still haunts her. 
 
It's a good thing that she meets Mary Crothery when she does. Mary is a young Traveller woman, and she knows more about Melody than she lets on. She might just save Melody's life. 
 
_________ 
 
'A joy to read, for all that it breaks your heart' INDEPENDENT 
 
'One of the finest writers working in Ireland today ... worthy of Greek Drama' GUARDIAN 
 
'A stunning piece of work, utterly truthful and emotionally powerful' JOSEPH O'CONNOR 
 
'Work of genius ... I was entranced by it. Buckled by it' SEBASTIAN BARRY

A joy to read, for all that it breaks your heart

One of the finest writers working in Ireland today ... worthy of Greek drama

An exquisite account of womanhood, friendship, prejudice and tradition that is both intimate in scale and awesome in achievement

Work of genius ... I was entranced by it. Buckled by it.

A stunning piece of work, utterly truthful and emotionally powerful

So beautifully written and so full of compassion and humanity that I wanted to set fire to my laptop and never write again.

Donal Ryan's new book is an enthrallingly impassioned and compassionate read, ferocious but humane. All We Shall Know acknowledges the acts of vicious self-destruction the human heart is capable of, but does not accept the irreparability of such acts. To his raw, wounded and grieving characters Donal Ryan says: If you are still breathing, you can be redeemed.

I read it with enormous pleasure. He is a remarkably imaginative and beautiful user of the language. This book is very moving and true. I love the truth in his work.

All We Shall Know is really very good. All that we've come to expect from Donal: great humanity and an uncanny sense of place but this time – and at last! – we have a man writing from a woman's point of view in a totally convincing and non-patronising way.

My book of the year . . . a remarkable piece of literature. . . . Gets under the skin and into the brain of the reader. It's so absorbing . . . a beauty.

Donal Ryan's finest and surest novel yet is a touching, unsentimental tale. . . . Ryan's empathy for his women adds depth, power and humanity to a layered story of love, betrayal and redemption.

All We Shall Know is a new and ambitious departure . . . exerts a powerful grip. . . . the novel, written at white heat in sentences that sometimes flow for a full paragraph, reads compulsively and is delivered with an impressively disciplined power. Ryan’s rise to prominence may have been meteoric and his output dizzyingly prolific, but he is a writer who is very far from being a flash in the pan.

Ryan is alert to the sharp, hurtful qualities of language. . . . His ear for dialogue is superb. . . . An awesome creation, [Melody] is at times heroically unlikeable.

A consummate artist . . . The denouement offers a satisfying element of redemption . . . a great writer whose steady maturation proceeds apace.

Raw, radiant prose . . . [a] wonderful novel.

[A] gem of a novel. With a sure sense of place, and a convincing portrayal of life lived at the edgy margins, it vividly plots the landscape of the heart en route to a gripping and ultimately redemptive finale.

Ryan's third novel is an elegant, unflinching, entirely brilliant look at the waywardness of desire. . . . searing honesty that is raw but utterly riveting.

A powerful story that will pull you into a whirlwind of emotion and pain, but also the faintest glimmer of hope.

A stunning story that deserves great success.

All We Shall Know blew me away, left me blubbering on my commute and wide awake at 2 a.m. . . . He excels at first-person narrative, and it's this that makes All We Shall Know unforgettable.

An intense, dramatic story . . . rather touching.

His best yet . . . I kept re-reading paragraphs and whole pages to savour Ryan's remarkable prose. The book imbues profanity with poetry, and the characters, for all their flaws, are beautifully and sympathetically drawn.

From a Low and Quiet Sea

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018, the powerful fourth novel from multi-award-winning author of The Spinning Heart.

A thing of such beauty and compassion, a reminder of what the very finest sentences can do to shatter and then reassemble our hearts

I struggle to think of a writer who has been so prolific and consistent in quality as Ryan . . . Brutally honest, moving and often hilarious

An engrossing, unpredictable, beautifully crafted novel; Donal Ryan is giving us characters - their angles and their language - that we haven’t seen in Irish literature before.

Donal Ryan has not only bounded over a wall into new territory, but built himself a castle there . . . This is a superb novel.

From a Low and Quiet Sea is not only very cleverly constructed, but deeply moving too. I loved it.

Donal Ryan writes characters so well that as a reader you think ‘I’ve met that man’, or ‘I know that woman.’ But as a writer you simply wonder ‘how does he do it?’ From a Low and Quiet Sea is brutal and beautiful, carefully crafted portraits, deep and real, tied together, fashioned by a true artist. I absolutely loved it.

Themes of kindness and humanity are the binding thread…and Ryan writes of them with characteristic warmth and insight.

It’s a beautiful, luminous kind of piece - full of mystery, compassion, woven with such skill; heartbreaking and restorative. I will carry these splintered men around with me for a long time, along with the women who have loved them.

From a Low and Quiet Sea is beautifully written, compassionate and almost unbearably moving. I loved it. I would struggle to think of any other Irish author working today who writes with as much compassion as Donal Ryan.

Donal Ryan writes with such sharp observation and humanity, that he makes us sit up and wonder at the tiny quiet internal lives of strangers. His writing is a wonderful gift to all of us. From a Low and Quiet Sea is another short and perfect novel to be inhaled in one heart-lurching gulp.

Ryan is not the first Irish writer indebted to Joyce, but his work reminds me of something Sylvia Beach said about Joyce: “He told me that he had never met a bore.”…Wonderful

Deft and devastating…this book is both hard-hitting and uplifting: it serves as an indictment of the care industry, but also as a tribute to the way that humans care for one another.

The denouement, which comes in breathless bursts, is devastating. From a Low and Quiet Sea leaves you with that sense of discombobulating enlightenment that so often characterises the quiet epiphanies of great short stories.

A masterly portrait . . . the confidence with which Ryan dons the clothing of another culture marks a departure for his writing . . . a successor to John McGahern . . . It is exciting to see his subject matter move beyond his country’s borders, with the prospect of more of this to come.’

The lives and stories, loves and tragedies, animating From a Low and Quiet Sea are wonderfully individual and finely alive. This is a brief book: yet one that lingers long in the reader’s mind.

As moving as anything written about Syria

Bewitching…unforgettable...It takes a good writer to frame right and wrong within a coherent narrative and make it not feel like a finger-wagging sermon. It takes a great one, however, to make the contents heave and sigh before your eyes.’

Ryan has the ability to shatter your heart into a million pieces with every book he writes - and even have you welcome the pain.

With each novel Ryan gets better, and this moving and quietly insistent work is his best yet.

You can sense his compassion in the bones of his work

A hugely affecting, moving read. I was heartbroken by the end, but adored every chapter

Each section displays Ryan’s range as a writer... [he] writes with brilliant empathy.

Exquisitely rendered, with raw anguish sublimated into lyrical prose.

Heartbreaking … Arguably the best of the new wave of Irish writers to have emerged over the last decade

Irish Mail on the Sunday, Books of the Year

Ryan has the gift of ventriloquism - he inhabits his fictional creations thoroughly, enveloping you in their worlds

From a Low and Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan made me laugh and cry and forced me to look strangers in the eye

Beautifully bleak and characterised by his remarkable ability to write about grief and common humanities.

Superlatives wouldn’t do for describing From a Low and Quiet Sea … understated, and gloriously heart rendering

Donal Ryan is from Nenagh in County Tipperary. He is the award-winning author of four novels and one short story collection. A former civil servant, Donal lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Limerick. He lives with his wife Anne Marie and their two children.

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018 
Shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2018 
 
'An engrossing, unpredictable, beautifully crafted novel' RODDY DOYLE 
 
 
Farouk's country has been torn apart by war. 
 
Lampy's heart has been laid waste by Chloe. 
 
John's past torments him as he nears his end. 
 
The refugee. The dreamer. The penitent. From war-torn Syria to small-town Ireland, three men, scarred by all they have loved and lost, are searching for some version of home. Each is drawn towards a powerful reckoning, one that will bring them together in the most unexpected of ways. 
 
_________ 
 
'A thing of such beauty and compassion, a reminder of what the very finest sentences can do to shatter and then reassemble our hearts' KAMILA SHAMSIE 
 
'I struggle to think of a writer who has been so prolific and consistent in quality as Ryan ... Brutally honest, moving and often hilarious' GUARDIAN 
 
'Donal Ryan has not only bounded over a wall into new territory, but built himself a castle there . . . This is a superb novel.' JOHN BOYNE 
 
'Beautiful and affecting' DAVID NICHOLLS 
 
'Donal Ryan writes characters so well that as a reader you think 'I've met that man', or 'I know that woman.' But as a writer you simply wonder 'how does he do it?' From a Low and Quiet Sea is brutal and beautiful, carefully crafted portraits, deep and real, tied together, fashioned by a true artist. I absolutely loved it.' KIT DE WAAL

Donal Ryan

A new Donal Ryan novel is always something to anticipate keenly and there is nothing to disappoint in the marvellous coming-of-age tale Where Are the Kings… A marvellous portrait of a bewildered , sad boy trying to understand a bizarre family with so many secrets while also making sense of the person he is becoming at the very moment of his dawning sexuality… A novel that has so much to say about how emotions fester , sibling jealousy, the weightlessness and formlessness of guilt , and the sudden healing power of "a deluge of love".

A novel bursting at the seams with love, humour and compassion.

In his story of a family wracked by loss, the prizewinning Irish author’s incisive prose and flashes of humour keep mawkish sentiment in check… this is a book marked by a frank and unusually high compassion for the uniquely trying experience of early adolescence…. It’s this kind of gentle but deep empathy that gives Where Are the Kings its radiance.

How is this tragic tale so funny? . . . Where Are the Kings has its tragedies, but they are wrapped in hope and human decency . . . this is a small book about small lives . . . written with tenderness and attention

Here is a book that will break your heart and stitch it back together again . . . Wisdom and tenderness lie at its core, a Ryan trademark, but this novel is extremely funny on the subject of teenage boys, and pitch perfect in its depiction of rural Irish life.

A timeless tale of family drama in rural Ireland . . . A gentle novel of ungentle things

Ryan elevates a story about adolescent grief and sexual awakening with prose of vivid, gleaming buoyancy. Every sentence is a treat.

All the characters are richly and idiosyncratically drawn . . . the writing […] recalls James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . . . Ryan offers a vivid and engaging account of Jack's life in the bustling rural household

As is always the case in Ryan's novels, solidarity is the only true cement... From tragedy springs a moral: ‘Every single particle in the universe exerts a force on every single other particle. Nothing exists in isolation.' Where Are the Kings is a marvellous study of the mind in crisis.

Donal Ryan's wrenching, gorgeous story of an orphaned boy connects the tectonic emotions of adolescence to the stormy tempers of the natural world

A new Donal Ryan novel is always something to be celebrated. For me, he has been the most consistently brilliant Irish writer of the last 15 years.

Vivacious, likeable characters from rural, working-class community . . . this is a complicated family dealing with its own secrets and lies, but grounded by a basic sense of decency and compassion

Beautiful, hilarious and completely gripping… I fell in love with the whole family, the sheer goodness of them, the way Donal Ryan gets inside Jack’s heart and head and explores the gap between them, what he knows and feels… a story filled with love that shines a light on all the hidden places. My life is better because of it.

A meditation on family, love and grief that made me laugh and cry in equal measure. A triumph

Jennie Godfrey, author of The List of Suspicious Things

I have been a fan of Donal's writing for the longest time...This novel though... oh my heart. To explore grief through the eyes of a child, and to do it so exquisitely and so elegantly, is just mind-blowing. The thing I LOVE about Donal Ryan's writing is that he uncovers the poetry that hides within ordinary life. He also conjures up characters so solid, so complete and authentic, it immediately feels as though you have known them for your entire life.

Joanna Cannon, author of The Trouble with Goats and Sheep

No one gets inside the heart like Donal Ryan. A book about belonging and coming home, about letting go and finding family. I loved it from the first word to the last.

Where are the Kings is a brilliant, quietly devastating exploration of the fledgling heart. Tender, funny, mysterious and hopeful, it’s a flawless gem about the imperfect yet profound ways in which families love, and what that love costs.

M L Stedman, Sunday Times bestselling author of A Far-flung Life and The Light Between Oceans

The arrival of a new Donal Ryan novel always feels like Christmas morning and Where are the Kings does not disappoint. It's a powerful meditation on boyhood, family and trauma, expertly couched in Ryan's devastating prose. Warm, irreverent and desperately humane this is a novel which manages to be timeless, current and prescient.

You know when a book is so arresting, so captivating, that you have to actively seek a long time just to think about it – to luxuriate in the characters in all their charm and humour and sadness and confusion, a book that makes you look at the world differently, while at the same time cranking open your heart and letting the whole world pour in…We are the Kings. This is that book.

Ryan has an exceptional ability to capture the complexities of ordinary lives, and this beautifully crafted novel is filled with compassion, humour and humanity.

There is an alchemy in how Ryan transforms a kitchen table or a garage into an arena of hope and pain . . . It’s what we’ve seen Ryan do time after time, and yet these blocks of symphonic, unspooling sentences still feel like contained literary achievements . . . It is the trademark conjuring of a writer who gives voice to Irish peculiarities of the heart . . . More poignantly, Jack’s coming-of-age odyssey speaks to the ability of unshowy, everyday humanity to make up some of the ground lost to tragedy.

Crackling with humorous dialogue, it's a novel of rare humanity and beautiful tenderness that lives long in the mind. Highly recommended.

Donal Ryan has a talent for making the daily stories of family stand wonderfully large . . . The beauty is in moments laced with heartbreak and humour.

Tender, moving, full of warmth, crackling with humour and the love of family, the exquisite new novel from the author of HEART BE AT PEACE. 
 
A RADIO 2 BOOK CLUB BOOK 
 
‘Beautiful, hilarious and completely gripping’ Rachel Joyce, bestselling author of The Handmade God 
 
'I loved it from the first word to the last' Kit de Waal, author of The Best of Everything 
 
'A beautiful book. And wise. And tender. And funny' Sarah Winman, author of Still Life 
 
'Made me laugh and cry in equal measure' Jennie Godfrey, author of The List of Suspicious Things 
 
*** 
Something terrible has happened to Jack but no one seems to want to talk about it. 
 
His uncles can tell him about everything from quantum physics to how to hunt for deer, but they can’t seem to tell him anything about their own sister or why Jack doesn’t feel sad for her in the way he should, or why Grandad tries to shoot Jack’s dad when he gets out of the hospital. 
 
Still, there’s work to be done in the oily wonderland of his uncles’ garage; there’s his beautiful aunt Rose to hypnotise him and his loving grandparents to console him; then there’s JJ, who wants to fight him one day and save him the next. 
 
But with so many questions, in a family with so many secrets, it is difficult for Jack to understand the person he is becoming. How can a simple boy learn to become a king? 
 
Timeless and elegiac, Where are the Kings is a beautifully wrought novel for fans of Colm Tóibín, Samantha Harvey and Douglas Stuart's Shuggie Bain. 
____ 
 
'A book that will break your heart and stitch it back together again' Irish Independent 
 
‘Donal Ryan conjures up characters so solid, so complete and authentic, it immediately feels as though you have known them for your entire life’ JOANNA CANNON, author of An Unlikely Visitor 
 
'Tender, funny, mysterious and hopeful... a flawless gem' M L Stedman, Sunday Times bestselling author of A Far-flung Life and The Light Between Oceans 
 
'Warm, irreverent and desperately humane.' Jan Carson, author of Few & Far Between 
 
'So arresting, so captivating...a book that makes you look at the world differently, while at the same time cranking open your heart and letting the whole world pour in.' Annie Macmanus 
 
* Number One bestseller, Irish Times, August 2026

Donal Ryan

Books by Donal Ryan

Articles featuring Donal Ryan

“This is my most personal novel yet”: Donal Ryan on Strange Flowers

Donal Ryan on his brush with Traveller magic

A Conversation with Donal Ryan

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