He lives with his wife Anne Marie and their two children just outside Limerick City. His fourth novel, From a Lowand Quiet Sea, was longlisted for Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2018.Ī former civil servant, Donal lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Limerick. The Spinning Heart won the Guardian First Book Award, the EU Prize for Literature (Ireland), and Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards it was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Desmond Elliott Prize, and was voted 'Irish Book of the Decade'. His first three novels, The Spinning Heart, The Thing About December and All We Shall Know, and his short story collection A Slanting of the Sun, have all been published to major acclaim. About all the things family can be and all the things it sometimes isn't. From the prize-winning author of Strange Flowers and The Spinning Heart, The Queen of Dirt Island is a celebration of fierce, loyal love and the powerful stories that bind generations of women together.ĭonal Ryan is from Nenagh in County Tipperary.

It's a story of terrible betrayals and fierce loyalties, of isolat ion and togetherness, of transgression, forgiveness, desire, and love. It involves wives and widows, gunrunners and gougers, sinners and saints. Their story begins at an end and ends at a beginning. The Queen of Dirt Island By Donal Ryan Review by Harvey Freedenberg This story of four generations of Irish women fractiously sharing their village home in modern-day County Tipperary has a gentle heart and a spine of steel, its appeal enhanced by Donal Ryan’s understated yet evocative prose. You'd have to know them to know - in spite of what the neighbours might say about raised voices and dramatic scenes - that their house is a place of peace, filled with love, a refuge from the sadness and cruelty of the world. The Aylward women of Nenagh, Tipperary, are mad about each other, but you wouldn't always think it. The Queen of Dirt Island: From the Booker-longlisted No.1 bestselling author of Strange Flowers Hardcover 18 Aug.

The queen of dirt island