The Queen of Dirt Island

'[A] master storyteller. The most vivid characters, so full of life. You read each short chapter wondering how he's crammed in so much heart and wonder, while the story itself ramps up to its quietly devastating and marvellous conclusion.'

KIT DE WAAL

I was thunderstruck by this exquisitely beautiful and powerful novel. This is writing of shimmering truthfulness, empathy and authority by the most consistently brilliant Irish writer of his generation.

JOSEPH O'CONNOR

'Donal Ryan repeatedly broke my heart and then soldered it back together with words of molten gold. The Queen of Dirt Island is a powerful tribute to mothers in all of their ferocity, tenderness and guilt. I loved this book with my whole patchwork heart. Eloquent, beautiful and threaded throughout with a joyful savage humour, a privilege to read, and re-read.'

LIZ NUGENT

Donal Ryan makes writing look effortless. He manages to capture the world and all its broken beauty in one tiny corner of Ireland. His characters feel like people you've always known. His words seem to sing off the page.

JAN CARSON

This is a generous mosaic of a novel about the staying power of love and pride and history and family. While Donal Ryan is never afraid of "all the meanness and sorrow of the world," he also manages to excavate the thrilling beauties that hold us together. He manages, with wit and grace, to illuminate the anonymous corners of human experience and get at the underworld of our souls.

COLUM McCANN

The Queen of Dirt Island is the work of a master writer in full flow. Donal Ryan is uncommonly perceptive at finding greatness in humanity's goodness. This is his best novel yet.

RÓNÁN HESSION

In gorgeous, graceful prose, Donal Ryan tells the story of four generations of women in this tender, joyful gem of a novel.

PAULA HAWKINS

Donal Ryan is one of the finest novelists writing today and this is a gem of a novel. Full of humanity, humility, humour, drama and mystery, his characters are so vivid you feel they are sitting outside, waiting for him to conjure them to life. He writes with grace and precision, with love indeed, about who we are and why, about family history and the ghosts we carry. A haunting, exquisite masterpiece.

RACHEL JOYCE

An endlessly surprising story of the heart's secret places, and what we hide there... This magnificent novel confirms Donal Ryan is a writer of rare and precious vision: he sees the world as it ought to be, and dares you to believe in it.

MICHAEL HUGHES

A stunning portrayal of intergenerational family love and the complications of the human condition. I was swept up in the world of the Aylward women: in their power and pain and mostly, in their fierce resilience. A novel full of compassion and honesty, where love triumphs. The prose is pitch perfect.

ELAINE FEENEY

Beautifully poised, sad, poetic and human....I loved every single line.

IAN RANKIN

Hymn to the warp and woof of life; celebration of the flip-flop way of family; soaring testimony to the endurance of the human spirit. And all delivered with his trademark compassion, empathy, humour and brio. A gift of a book.

ALAN McMONAGLE

A compelling read

SAINSBURY'S MAGAZINE

Ryan's writing is like poetry and he has a real gift for creating characters who live in full technicolour. Highly recommend

Good Housekeeping

From its opening pages, this book exerts a quiet, propulsive hold over its reader. The three generations of Aylward women will break your heart and then put it back together again. It's a beautiful, compassionate novel - Donal Ryan at his inimitable best.

MAGGIE O'FARRELL

In Ryan's hands the mundane and the everyday is transformed into a thing of beauty, thrumming with significance.

REFINERY 29

Simply sumptuous...This soaring tale of four generations of women in a small Irish town is bursting with humour and pathos. The Queen of Dirt Island contains shocking twists, deaths, reflections on how fiction misappropriates lives and a sharp portrait of how love can lift and twist the human heart....glorious.

INDEPENDENT

Beautiful, absorbing

SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

Tender with comic observation ... a topsy-turvy emotional rollercoaster

DAILY MAIL

Big-hearted, generous and brimful of emotion, this is a gorgeous, life-enhancing novel.

Mail on Sunday

Magical

OBSERVER

Exquisitely rendered. It reads like musical sounds, full of light and lilting melody...it's funny and sad, and sparks with the most tremendous, tart, wit.

INews

Ryan's writing is so musical, so easily heard, that your eyes will dance through its pages.

Joanna Cannon, Guardian Book of the Day

The characters are compelling and vividly drawn, the dialogue is profane and frequently hilarious; the prose drips like honey off a spoon.

SUNDAY TIMES

A jewel of a novel that will surely become a classic... enthralling and unmissable

DAILY EXPRESS, 'Fiction Highlights of 2022'

A celebration of love and loyalty among women.

IRISH INDEPENDENT

Big-hearted, generous and brimful of emotion, this a gorgeous, life-enhancing read

IRISH MAIL ON SUNDAY

It is a beaut. It's a celebration of women and of womanhood. I see my mother in this, I see my sister ... This book is a joy.

RYAN TUBRIDY

If language - lyric, lovely and funny, steeped in County Tipperary - and women (men come and go, rarely center a chapter and are often useless, sometimes cruel) are of no interest to you, The Queen of Dirt Island is not your next read. Ryan's book is a celebration, in an embroidered, unrestrained, joyful, aphoristic and sometimes profane style, of both ... The Queen of Dirt Island gives the women their due, and the reader is rewarded.

NEW YORK TIMES

Donal Ryan's The Queen of Dirt Island is a little Irish miracle ... there's as much implicit wisdom in these pages about how to live as how to write ... Ryan has his own emotional range and a way of capturing the largeness of what look like tiny lives but aren't

WASHINGTON POST

I truly enjoyed The Queen Of Dirt Island from its jolting first chapter to its calm, graceful conclusion. Now I'm on to Strange Flowers.

PAUL SIMON