Donal Ryan made a stir straight out of the gate. His first novel, The Spinning Heart, published a dozen years ago, won the Guardian first book award and was longlisted for the Booker prize. 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. Some compared the book to Edgar Lee Masters’ lyrical Spoon River Anthology; William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying also comes to mind.
Since then, Ryan has published five more novels and a book of short stories, firmly establishing himself in a generation of remarkable Irish writers – Claire Kilroy, Claire-Louise Bennett, Kevin Barry, Eimear McBride, the list could go on and on. He is a writer who likes a conceit: a chronological structure to contain the narrative; multiple voices. It is a measure of his skill, and gift for both language and character, that these techniques don’t seem like contrivances, but rather widen the reader’s sense of what a story can be.
