The Irish Literary Times

Anyone who was in London this summer, and saw posters for Eimear McBride's debut novel, A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing plastered across the sides of buses, would have been forgiven for t

In Donal Ryan’s compact debut novel, “The Spinning Heart,” effects of the economic downturn ripple through an Irish village whose laborers, flush during the boom, have been left in the lurch now that the local developer, Pokey Burke, has skipped town.

The spinning heart of the title, a decorative ornament on a cottage gate, “skewered on a rotating hinge,” is an apt image both for the town’s collective heartache and for the narrative progression, which moves continuously from one villager to the next, 21 narrators (and chapters) in all. Each speaker has been wounded — by the economy as well as by grim parents, cruel lovers, 

Donal Ryan's second novel, set in rural Ireland, is an exquisite tale of a man-child's struggle to make sense of a greedy world, writes Anne Enright

'Audacious' debut takes £10,000 prize for interlocking stories of austerity Ireland

Irish author Donal Ryan is one of twelve writers to win the 2015 European Union Prize for Literature at the London Book Fair.

The full line-up for this years Festival of Writing and Ideas in Carlow. Take a look!

Ryan finds darkness and wit in a tale of rural Irish life, writes Sebastian Barry