Viking, New York, NY, 2023 $27
By Sabina Clarke
Irish writer Donal Ryan’s latest novel The Queen of Dirt Island –his seventh --is an exquisitely wrought piece of fiction tracing the lives of four generations of women in one family --the wayward women of Nenagh, Tipperary.
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Ryan captures the soul of the Irish - their prejudices and hypocrisies, their petty jealousies and superstitions and their resilience. His characters are full of goodness and flawed. Their fears, their longings, their weaknesses and their strengths are laid bare enveloping us in their orbit until empathy for them is inevitable.
This panoramic tale sparkles with insight, poetry, emotional depth, raucous humor and profound truths. 
Donal Ryan
Ryan style is lilting and visual and poetic – filled with symbolism and images--- a steady stream of consciousness. . Metaphors abound like ‘the cherry blossom blazing pink, the grass warm under her feet” and the ever present yet comforting sense of resignation captured in daily chatter “ Haven’t people the same troubles no matter what?”
The central character is Saoirse, the narrator who was born under a cloud to a single mother—one of the greatest scandals in old Ireland. Her earliest memory when she just turned five was of “ the cherry blossom tree heavily flowered at the edge of the small front garden; it was itself the greater part of the memory.”
Saoirse is introspective, perceptive and a keen observer who watches the interactions between her mother and her grandmother and realizes that “her mother rarely spoke at all” and most of her speech was indirect-- “flung around like fistfuls of confetti.”
The plot with its many twists and turns and surprises is full of drama. The characters are well drawn and even when they are at times unlikeable they are sympathetic and full of humanity. This is a tale that left me wanting even more.
About the author: Donal Ryan is a novelist and short story writer from Nenagh, County Tipperary, Ireland. He has won several national and international awards for his fiction and has twice been nominated for the Booker Prize. His work has been adapted for stage and screen and translated into more than twenty languages. He is a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Limerick and lives in Limerick with his wife Anne Marie and their two children. The Queen of Dirt Island is his seventh book and was an instant number one bestseller in Ireland.
