All We Shall Know

Donal Ryan's new book is an enthrallingly impassioned and compassionate read, ferocious but humane. All We Shall Know acknowledges the acts of vicious self-destruction the human heart is capable of, but does not accept the irreparability of such acts. To his raw, wounded and grieving characters Donal Ryan says: If you are still breathing, you can be redeemed.

Colin Barrett

I read it with enormous pleasure. He is a remarkably imaginative and beautiful user of the language. This book is very moving and true. I love the truth in his work.

Jennifer Johnston

All We Shall Know is really very good. All that we've come to expect from Donal: great humanity and an uncanny sense of place but this time – and at last! – we have a man writing from a woman's point of view in a totally convincing and non-patronising way.

Christine Dwyer Hickey

Donal Ryan's finest and surest novel yet is a touching, unsentimental tale. . . . Ryan's empathy for his women adds depth, power and humanity to a layered story of love, betrayal and redemption.

RTE Guide

Ryan's third novel is an elegant, unflinching, entirely brilliant look at the waywardness of desire. . . . searing honesty that is raw but utterly riveting.

Psychologies magazine

Gripping and beautiful.

Image magazine

Shines through its female characters.

Irish Tatler

A powerful story that will pull you into a whirlwind of emotion and pain, but also the faintest glimmer of hope.

Irish Country magazine

Raw and redemptive.

Sunday Business Post

Raw, radiant prose . . . [a] wonderful novel.

Sunday Express

A stunning story that deserves great success.

Good Housekeeping

A consummate artist . . . The denouement offers a satisfying element of redemption . . . a great writer whose steady maturation proceeds apace.

The Sunday Times

My book of the year . . . a remarkable piece of literature. . . . Gets under the skin and into the brain of the reader. It's so absorbing . . . a beauty.

Ryan Tubridy, RTE Radio 1

[A] gem of a novel. With a sure sense of place, and a convincing portrayal of life lived at the edgy margins, it vividly plots the landscape of the heart en route to a gripping and ultimately redemptive finale.

Daily Mail

All We Shall Know is a new and ambitious departure . . . exerts a powerful grip. . . . the novel, written at white heat in sentences that sometimes flow for a full paragraph, reads compulsively and is delivered with an impressively disciplined power. Ryan’s rise to prominence may have been meteoric and his output dizzyingly prolific, but he is a writer who is very far from being a flash in the pan.

Roy Foster, The Irish TImes

All We Shall Know blew me away, left me blubbering on my commute and wide awake at 2 a.m. . . . He excels at first-person narrative, and it's this that makes All We Shall Know unforgettable.

Stylist magazine

One of the finest writers working in Ireland today ... worthy of Greek drama

Guardian

An intense, dramatic story . . . rather touching.

Mail on Sunday

His best yet . . . I kept re-reading paragraphs and whole pages to savour Ryan's remarkable prose. The book imbues profanity with poetry, and the characters, for all their flaws, are beautifully and sympathetically drawn.

Hot Press

Dazzling

Mariella Frostrup, Open Book, BBC Radio 4

Unflinching.

Radio Times

A wonderful novel.

S Magazine

In a word, this book is stunning.

The Bookseller

Poetic, powerful and heart-rending

The Times

A joy to read, for all that it breaks your heart

Independent

Work of genius ... I was entranced by it. Buckled by it.

Sebastian Barry

A stunning piece of work, utterly truthful and emotionally powerful

Joseph O’Connor

So beautifully written and so full of compassion and humanity that I wanted to set fire to my laptop and never write again.

Liz Nugent, Irish Independent Books of the Year

Ryan is alert to the sharp, hurtful qualities of language. . . . His ear for dialogue is superb. . . . An awesome creation, [Melody] is at times heroically unlikeable.

Peter Brown, Times Literary Supplement

An exquisite account of womanhood, friendship, prejudice and tradition that is both intimate in scale and awesome in achievement

Irish Independent