Strange Flowers

The Number One Bestseller

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Summary

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.

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'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

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

About the author

Donal Ryan

Donal Ryan is an award-winning author from Nenagh, County Tipperary, whose work has been published in over twenty languages to major critical 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 the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2018, and won the Jean Monnet Prize for European Literature. His novel, Strange Flowers, was voted Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, and was a number one bestseller, as was his most recent novel The Queen of Dirt Island, which was also shortlisted for Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. 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.

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