The Spinning Heart
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THE STUNNING FIRST NOVEL BY THE AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF HEART BE AT PEACE AND STRANGE FLOWERS
Winner of the Guardian First Book Award Shortlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Literary Award Longlisted for the Man Booker PrizeWinner of Book of the Year at the Irish Book AwardsWinner of the European Prize for Literature Voted Irish Book of the Decade in 2016
“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.”
Now five times winner of the Irish Novel of the Year and No.1 bestselling author, Donal Ryan exploded on to the literary scene with his stunning debut, set in the aftermath of Ireland’s financial collapse. When dangerous tensions surface in a small Irish town, the characters face a battle between their public persona and inner desires. Told through a chorus of twenty-one 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.
DISCOVER DONAL RYAN'S NEW NOVEL, HEART BE AT PEACE, WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR FICTION AND THE IRISH BOOK OF THE YEAR
****
'Filled with light and shade, love and tragedy ... if it was a song you could sing it' ANNE ENRIGHT
'Donal Ryan is the real deal ... a brilliantly realised, utterly resonant state-of-the-nation landscape' SUNDAY INDEPENDENT
'I can't imagine a more original, more perceptive or more passionate work than this. Outstanding' JOHN BOYNE
'It's furious, it's moving, it's darkly funny, it punches you right in the gut' NEW YORK TIMES
'Funny, moving and beautifully written' EDNA O'BRIEN
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The winner of the Guardian First Book Award features a chorus of voices telling the story of an Irish village undergoing a post-recession crisis and evokes Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, right down to a section narrated by a recently deceased character. At the center is Bobby Mahon, a building foreman who discovers, as the book opens, that his boss has "shafted" him and his coworkers, cheating them of a pension and disappearing after the housing boom goes bust. Bobby's decency is admired by everyone, and it underpins the novel: the belief in Bobby's good nature seems to unite these people, to serve as a salve on the wounds of economic collapse. As rumors spread that Bobby is having an affair and that he has killed his loathed father, and as a child disappears, the villagers will need to marshal their faith in him. Equal parts mournful and hopeful, the book pays keen attention to the ways lives coalesce and fall apart in time of personal and national crises. Even as some of the voices seem extraneous, added for color but little else, Ryan has created a faithful portrait of a time and place in his debut novel, but his truest accomplishment lies in the fact that, though the individual accounts add up to a greater whole, each story stands on its own.
