Donal Ryan’s three carefully crafted portraits of three differently damaged men tied together with tender skill and compassion.

Farouk’s country has been torn apart by war. Lampy’s heart has been laid waste by Chloe. John’s past torments him as he nears his end. The refugee. The dreamer. The penitent. From war-torn Syria to small-town Ireland, three men, scarred by all they have loved and lost, are searching for some version of home. Each is drawn towards a powerful reckoning, one that will bring them together in the most unexpected of ways.

"Like its predecessors, the novel is concerned with the vulnerable, unspeakable and furious aspects of masculinity and is in Ryan’s distinctive colloquial style. The prose is laced with compassion and quiet emotion ... It is in the final 28 pages that the three strands, which sway in the same melancholic wind but rarely collide, are blown together in a gust of pacey, heart-wrenching action—and you realise they were destined to knot all along. The denouement, which comes in breathless bursts, is devastating. From a Low and Quiet Sea leaves you with that sense of discombobulating enlightenment that so often characterizes the quiet epiphanies of great short stories." - Eithne Shortall, The TImes (UK)

Donal Ryan is a writer and lecturer from County Tipperary. His novel The Spinning Heart won the Guardian First Book Award, the EU Prize for Literature (Ireland), and Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards; it was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and was voted ‘Irish Book of the Decade’. A former civil servant, Donal lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Limerick.

From A Low and Quiet Sea

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