We negotiate these battles alongside Saoirse, as we learn that Eileen is both the subject of the book’s title and the scandal of the village. Saoirse and her mother must fight for Dirt Island, but also against the patriarchy surrounding it.
It’s only when a battle begins to rage for the inheritance of Dirt Island – a narrow strip of land adjacent to Eileen’s childhood home – that the details of that estrangement become clear. Due to Eileen having “shamed” her family and its traditional farming community, contact with her relatives is rare and fractured. Her mother’s younger brother Richard is more sinister. Her uncles Chris and Paudie are weak and foolish. There are few men in fatherless Saoirse’s life, and the ones who do inhabit it are not drawn favourably. Ryan’s writing is so musical, so easily heard, that your eyes will dance through the pages We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. For more information see our Privacy Policy. Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties.
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Opposite Nana is her widowed daughter-in-law Eileen, and loitering in the doorway is our narrator, Eileen’s young daughter Saoirse (a name Eileen worries over: “if she ever goes to America the Yanks won’t have a clue how to pronounce it”), eavesdropping on a life she has yet to understand. Nana is at the head of this table: a woman who has buried two of her sons, yet whose wry observations provide much of the humour.
They gather around the kitchen table to smoke and talk and drink tea, and in the process help us understand our own lives just that little bit better. His seventh novel follows the lives of four generations of the Aylwards, a family of strong Irish women whose men have either died or absconded. Ryan won the Guardian first book award in 2013 for The Spinning Heart, set in rural Ireland after the collapse of the Celtic Tiger. Between those events lies a coming-of-age story that explores the challenges of growing up in a tight rural community in 1980s Ireland, and the broader landscape of prejudice, misogyny and family conflict. It begins with an ending – the abrupt loss of a character we have only just met – yet concludes with a hope for the people he left behind. D onal Ryan’s latest novel is a book of opposing forces.
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