The Queen of Dirt Island

This is a generous mosaic of a novel about the staying power of love and pride and history and family. While Donal Ryan is never afraid of “all the meanness and sorrow of the world,” he also manages to excavate the thrilling beauties that hold us together. He manages, with wit and grace, to illuminate the anonymous corners of human experience and get at the underworld of our souls. * COLUM McCANN *Donal Ryan is one of the finest novelists writing today and this is a gem of a novel. Full of humanity, humility, humour, drama and mystery, his characters are so vivid you feel they are sitting outside, waiting for him to conjure them to life. He writes with grace and precision, with love indeed, about who we are and why, about family history and the ghosts we carry. A haunting, exquisite masterpiece. * RACHEL JOYCE *From its opening pages, this book exerts a quiet, propulsive hold over its reader. The three generations of Aylward women will break your heart and then put it back together again. It’s a beautiful, compassionate novel - Donal Ryan at his inimitable best. * MAGGIE O’FARRELL *Beautifully poised, sad, poetic and human….I loved every single line. * IAN RANKIN *I truly enjoyed The Queen Of Dirt Island from its jolting first chapter to its calm, graceful conclusion. Now I’m on to Strange Flowers. * PAUL SIMON *Ryan’s writing is so musical, so easily heard, that your eyes will dance through its pages. * Joanna Cannon, Guardian Book of the Day *’[A] master storyteller. The most vivid characters, so full of life. You read each short chapter wondering how he’s crammed in so much heart and wonder, while the story itself ramps up to its quietly devastating and marvellous conclusion.’ * KIT DE WAAL *‘Donal Ryan repeatedly broke my heart and then soldered it back together with words of molten gold. The Queen of Dirt Island is a powerful tribute to mothers in all of their ferocity, tenderness and guilt. I loved this book with my whole patchwork heart. Eloquent, beautiful and threaded throughout with a joyful savage humour, a privilege to read, and re-read.’ * LIZ NUGENT *I was thunderstruck by this exquisitely beautiful and powerful novel. This is writing of shimmering truthfulness, empathy and authority by the most consistently brilliant Irish writer of his generation. * JOSEPH O’CONNOR *The Queen of Dirt Island is the work of a master writer in full flow. Donal Ryan is uncommonly perceptive at finding greatness in humanity’s goodness. This is his best novel yet. * RÓNÁN HESSION *

Donal Ryan, from Nenagh, County Tipperary, has published seven number one bestselling novels and a short story collection. He has won several awards for his fiction, including the European Union Prize for Literature, the Guardian First Book Award and six Irish Book Awards, and has been shortlisted for several more, including the Costa Book Award and the Dublin International Literary Award. He was nominated for the Booker Prize in 2013 for his debut novel, The Spinning Heart, and again in 2018, for his fourth novel, From A Low and Quiet Sea. The Spinning Heart was voted Irish Book of the Decade in 2016. In 2021 Donal became the first Irish writer to be awarded the Jean Monnet Prize for European Literature. His most recent novel, Heart Be at Peace, won both Novel of the Year and Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, and was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Nero Book Awards. His work has been adapted for stage and screen and translated into over twenty languages. Donal has lectured in Creative Writing at the University of Limerick since 2014 and lives in Castletroy with his wife Anne Marie and their two children.

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