If there’s one Irish writer I look forward to a new book by more than any other, it’s Donal Ryan. I’ve been a fan since he first published ‘The spinning heart’ back in 2022 and yet again he doesn’t disappoint, with ‘the queen of dirt island’, a story of three generations of women living in a house in a small estate in rural Tipperary.

Tragedy strikes in the first few pages of this book when an unnamed man dies on the very day his daughter Saoirse is born, and along with her mother Eileen and the man’s mother Nana, we meet three generations of the Alyward women in the aftermath. After that, there aren’t a lot of men about, though Nana has two sons, of whom one she says:

I was never able to have any more after Chris, you know. Whatever he was at inside in me he made a pure hames of my pipework. He started as he meant to go on, anyway, and that’s for sure.

Compassion

One of the things I love most about Donal Ryan, and it’s in each of his books, is the empathy he has for his characters. They are written with such compassion, and feel so real, there were times when I felt I could close my eyes and I was in the room with them.

You know the characters by their speech - Nana comes across loud and clear and I always enjoyed the banter between her and Eileen, her daughter in law. There’s a serious slagging goes on between those pair and as a character says at one point, if you were passing the house and you heard them you’d think they were at each others throats. But that’s not the case - they’ve been living in each others pockets for forty years and have a deep love and respect for one another.

Strange Flowers

‘The queen of dirt island’ is linked to the excellent ‘Strange Flowers’ and there’s a number of recurring characters, such as Josh and Honey. I like how Ryan does this - it gives his books a strong sense of community and place. You can certainly read this as a stand alone but I think there’s a depth that comes from knowing the history of the characters from ‘Strange Flowers.’

‘Queen of dirt island’ is divided up into small sections. At first I wasn’t sure about this, as it seemed to break up momentum, but it didn’t really bother me over the course of the book. As usual, Ryan’s pose is poetic and lyric and he varies the length of sentences for maximum effect. He writes like a dream.

Issues

He’s also not afraid to tackle issues society has faced in Ireland - unwed mothers, grief, loneliness, the troubles, mental illness, suicide, racism, infertility, violence - it’s all in there and one of the recurring themes is land and the ownership of it - the dirt island of the title - and the schisms that it opens between Eileen and her brother Richard. Brutal moments occur when you least expect them.

Ryan doesn’t flinch in his storytelling, and there’s a lot of pain in this book - as there is in the story of every family. But he also shows so clearly the love we have for each other is what carries us through, that’s all that matters in the end. These are strong women that have been through a lot but it’s the bonds they have with each other that sustain them through the worst of it. There’s a lot of tears in the book, but lots of laughs as well, as there are around the table in every family. Nobody writes better about the overlapping generations of families.

Storytelling

I was sad to finish this as Ryan’s masterful storytelling allowed me to disappear into this book for a few hours. I hope we see something of Saoirse and Pearl and Eileen in future, just as the Gladneys feature here. And as always, such wonderful writing and no doubt this will feature in many lists of the best Irish fiction in 2022.

”Saoirse couldn’t quite follow her grandmother’s words. They felt like a stream of sparkling water that the sun was shining on so fiercely that you couldn’t quite see the stream itself but just the light off it, blazing up from the earth and into your eyes, like the stream that ran down from the hills and through the village and into the callaghs where it met the lake. A stream of sadness, she thought, and she was happy with the words, thinking that she should write them down somewhere.”

Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Random House Doubleday for the Advanced Reader Copy.

The queen of dirt island by Donal Ryan

August 18, 2022 by Doubleday

248 Pages

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