The Spinning Heart

Filled with light and shade, love and tragedy ... if it was a song you could sing it -- Anne Enright Its furious, its moving, its darkly funny, it punches you right in the gut, the writing is effortlessly wonderful, and every one of the wide variety of voices rings utterly true. -- Tana French * New York Times * Donal Ryan is the real deal A brilliantly realised, utterly resonant state-of-the-nation landscape * Sunday Independent * Donal Ryans precise and evocative debut is a textured account of a community as it was during a brief moment of time. unexpectedly tender Ryans prism of life and lives is compellingly humane. This is an exciting, relevant and believable contemporary novel about the lost and the wounded that listens to the present without discarding either the sins of the fathers or the literary legacy of the past. -- Eileen Battersby * The Irish Times * Theres a powerful sense of place and shared history binding Ryans many voices, their inner and outer selves, distilling a linguistic richness comparable to Under Milk Wood. . . . Ryans novel . . . seems to draw speech out of the deepest silences; the testimony of his characters rings rich and true funny and poignant and banal and extraordinary and we cant help but listen. * The Guardian *

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.