Editions

Strange Flowers

  • Imprint: Doubleday

  • ISBN: 9780857525222

  • Length: 240  Pages

  • Dimensions: 223mm x 23mm x 145mm

  • Weight: 355g

  • RRP: £12.99

Strange Flowers

  • The Number One Bestseller

WINNER of the An Post Irish Novel of the Year 2020

'Endlessly surprising and incredibly moving' David Nicholls

'A triumph ... the best novel I've read so far this year' Joseph O'Connor

________________

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.

________________

'Here is love as a weapon and a balm ... A gorgeously wrought book' Guardian

'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

  • Imprint: Doubleday

  • ISBN: 9780857525222

  • Length: 240  Pages

  • Dimensions: 223mm x 23mm x 145mm

  • Weight: 355g

  • RRP: £12.99

Reviews

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

    Guardian

  • Endlessly surprising and incredibly moving

    David Nicholls

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

    Independent, Best Books of 2020

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

    Sunday Express

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

    Rachel Joyce

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

    Joseph O'Connor

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

    Kit de Waal

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

    Observer

  • 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

    Sarah Moss, The Times

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

    Best Irish Novels of the Year, Irish Independent

More from this Author

About the Author

Donal Ryan

Donal Ryan is from Nenagh in County Tipperary. His first three novels, The Spinning Heart, The Thing About December and All We Shall Know, and his short story collection A Slanting of the Sun, have all been published to major acclaim. The Spinning Heart won the Guardian First Book Award, the EU Prize for Literature (Ireland), and Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards; it was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Desmond Elliott Prize, and was voted 'Irish Book of the Decade'. His fourth novel, From a Low and Quiet Sea, was longlisted for Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2018. 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 just outside Limerick City.

Donal Ryan

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