Heart, Be At Peace by Donal Ryan #HeartBeAtPeace #DonalRyan @DoubledayUK #BookReview

 

Some things can send a heart spinning; others will crack it in two...

In a small town in rural Ireland, the local people have weathered the storms of economic collapse and are looking towards the future. The jobs are back, the dramas of the past seemingly lulled, and although the town bears the marks of its history, new stories are unfolding.

But a fresh menace is creeping around the lakeshore and the lanes of the town, and the peace of the community is about to be shattered in an unimaginable way. Young people are being drawn towards the promise of fast money whilst the generation above them tries to push back the tide of an enemy no one can touch…

Told in twenty-one voices, Heart, be at Peace is a heartfelt, lyrical novel that can be read independently, or as a companion to Donal Ryan’s multi-award-winning novel, The Spinning Heart, voted ‘The Irish Book of the Decade’.

Heart, Be At Peace by Donal Ryan is published in hardback on 8 August 2024 by Doubleday. My thanks to the publisher who sent my copy for review. 

It is a very fine, and talented author that can tell the story of a whole town, its history, its present and the hope for its future in just under 200 pages, and in twenty-one different voices. Donal Ryan achieves this. His writing is an absolute joy, his setting is vivid described and the characters are just incredible.

Each and every one of these twenty-one characters is unique, with a different voice, a different style of narrative, with differing views and sometimes completely contrasting thoughts about the same circumstances. 

This is not a linear novel, the reader is hurled back and forwards, from person to person, from era to era, yet the incredible interweaving of each voice works so very well. We may learn something quite vague in one chapter, we may wonder how or why one particular incident is relevant to the story, and then, we hear about that happening again, from a different character and everything just falls into place. 

It is basically the story of a small Irish town and the people who live there. The town is changing, and although there have been tragedies and hard times in the past, it is the dark shadows of a fresh menace that is the focus of this story. 

The story is full of compassion, it is often brutal, sometimes coarse, there are scenes that will make the reader laugh out loud and there are those that tear a small piece away from your heart. This is a raw and totally human look at people, and community and relationships. 

An epic novel, yet a slim volume. This is one of the most beguiling stories, with some of the sharpest, most lyrical writing that I've read in many a year. Highly recommended. 

Donal Ryan is an award-winning author from Nenagh, County Tipperary, whose work has been published in over twenty languages to major critical acclaim. 

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 fourth novel, From a Low and Quiet Sea, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2018, and won the Jean Monnet Prize for European Literature. 

His novel, Strange Flowers, was voted Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, and was a number one bestseller, as was his most recent novel The Queen of Dirt Island, which was also shortlisted for Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. 

Donal lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Limerick. 

He lives with his wife Anne Marie and their two children just outside Limerick City.