Donal Ryan’s latest novel is a book of opposing forces. It begins with an ending – the abrupt loss of a character we have only just met – yet concludes with a hope for the people he left behind. Between those events lies a coming-of-age story that explores the challenges of growing up in a tight rural community in 1980s Ireland, and the broader landscape of prejudice, misogyny and family conflict.
Ryan won the Guardian first book award in 2013 for The Spinning Heart, set in rural Ireland after the collapse of the Celtic Tiger. His seventh novel follows the lives of four generations of the Aylwards, a family of strong Irish women whose men have either died or absconded. They gather around the kitchen table to smoke and talk and drink tea, and in the process help us understand our own lives just that little bit better. Nana is at the head of this table: a woman who has buried two of her sons, yet whose wry observations provide much of the humour. Opposite Nana is her widowed daughter-in-law Eileen, and loitering in the doorway is our narrator, Eileen’s young daughter Saoirse (a name Eileen worries over: “if she ever goes to America the Yanks won’t have a clue how to pronounce it”), eavesdropping on a life she has yet to understand.
