Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
|
Loading... Heart, Be at Peaceby Donal Ryan
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.  TimBazzett | Sep 8, 2024 | 
 . A work of choral elegance, it is told in a sequence of 21 voices, inhabitants of a community in County Tipperary, Ireland – where Ryan himself is from – and unspooled the long and bitter wake of the 2008 financial crash in Ireland... Ryan deftly interweaves a larger sense of danger, and an understanding of Ireland’s history, with domestic concerns....This resolution, if examined closely, is perhaps a little too neat. Overall that doesn’t detract from the rich pleasures of this novel, in which Ryan captures the varieties of Irish English...Ryan reminds us that everyone we meet might be more than our easy assumptions, if we could only know their hearts. AwardsDistinctions
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. No library descriptions found. 
|
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers  
 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.92Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction 1900- 2000-RatingAverage: (4)
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Wikipedia in English
1
I first "discovered" Donal Ryan in 2018, by which time he'd already published four of his books, the first being THE SPINNING HEART, published by Lilliput Press in 2012 to unanimous praise and a few awards. It didn't make it across the pond to the U.S until 2014, when little Steerforth Press picked it up. Well, in August of 2018 I devoured all four of Ryan's early books and loved every one of them, and have continued to read him since that time.
His latest novel, HEART, BE AT PEACE (his eighth book in twelve years) has come back around to the first, ten years later. And, in a cataclysmic scene, that "spinning heart" in the grillwork of the gate to the Mahon house near the village of Nenagh, has stopped abruptly, and the lingering ghost of Frank Mahon witnesses it and is finally set free -
"... at my gate I'm stopped and the metal heart at the center of it that my wife loved so much the heart I had made for her one time in the foolishness of love that I thought would say for me the things I couldn't say myself is stopped. It isn't spinning any longer even with the clean breeze ... and I'm part of it now and I'm lifting fading now I'm away."
Although the new novel can be read as a heartbreakingly lovely stand-alone work, it can be even richer if you first read THE SPINNING HEART, because the format is identical, with each chapter in the voice of a different character, beginning with Bobby Mahon, progressing through Josie Burke and his adult children, the ne'er-do-well son Pokey and lesbian daughter Mags. And there is Denis, a self-confessed murderer redeemed by love and unexpected fatherhood. And Millicent, an innocent teenager trapped in a relationship with Augie, the homeboy drug dealer. And Lily, her grandmother, a witch. All the way through to Bobby's wife, Triona.
The same all too human denizens of Nenagh that Ryan first gave us in THE SPINNING HEART are back again, all twenty-one of them, and in the same order: Bobby, Josie, Lily, Vasya, Realtin, Timmy, Brian, Trevor, Bridie, Jason, Hillary, Seanie, Kate, Lloyd, Rory, Millicent, Denis, Mags, Jim, Frank and Triona. I confess I had to backtrack and write them down from the chapter headings. My old head can only keep so much together anymore. I'm afraid I'm not doing justice to this latest beautifully written offering from Donal Ryan, currently one of the best-selling writers in Ireland and the UK. Suffice it to simply say I love the way this guy writes, and give this book, yet again, my very very highest recommendation. Bravo, Mr Ryan. Bravo!
- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER (