The Spinning Heart - Format B - Tapa blanda

"Funny, moving and beautifully written" (Edna O'Brien)

"Filled with light and shade, love and tragedy ... if it was a song you could sing it" (Anne Enright)

"It’s furious, it’s moving, it’s 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 Ryan’s precise and evocative debut ... is a textured account of a community as it was during a brief moment of time. ... unexpectedly tender ... Ryan’s 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)

‘A modern literary masterpiece.’ – Ryan Tubridy, RTE

‘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.’

In the aftermath of Ireland’s financial collapse, dangerous tensions surface in an Irish town. As violence flares, the characters face a battle between public persona and inner desires. Through a chorus of 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. Technically daring and evocative of Patrick McCabe and J.M. Synge, this novel of small-town life is witty, dark and sweetly poignant.

Donal Ryan's brilliantly realized debut announces a stunning new voice in literary fiction.
‘I can’t imagine a more original, more perceptive or more passionate work than this. Outstanding.’ – John Boyne

‘A wonderful book ... The best first novel I’ve read for years and years and years.’ – Jennifer Johnston

‘Unexpectedly tender ... compellingly humane ... an exciting, relevant and believable contemporary novel about the lost and the wounded ...’ – The Irish Times

‘Perceptive, intimate and darkly comic.’ – The Observer