The portrait of a whole town facing sudden crisis naturally packs quite a punch. Even so, the most impressive aspect of this overwhelmingly impressive novel is the sheer quality of those 21 narrations. Apart, understandably, from a now-marooned Siberian immigrant, everybody speaks with varying degrees of Irish demotic (‘in school I was well able for the English and geography and history’). Nonetheless, all are perfectly distinguishable, and in every case — including the Siberian immigrant — Ryan triumphantly pulls off a trick more usually associated with the best theatre: that of entirely convincing heightened speech. These monologues, you feel, may not be exactly what the characters would say — but they are exactly what the characters would want to say. As a result, we’re led deep into what I’m tempted to call their souls....Of course, the traditional epithet for a good first novel is ‘promising’. The Spinning Heart, however, is far more than that. Instead, it’s the unambiguous announcement of a genuine and apparently fully-formed new talent.

Stories of murder, betrayal and kidnap thread through The Spinning Heart, Donal Ryan's debut, which is told from the points of view of 21 people struggling to get by in a rural village in contemporary south-west Ireland.
Compared to J M Synge and Patrick McCabe, praised by The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas author John Boyne and chosen to be the first novelist published by Doubleday Ireland, Ryan has a writing style that is perceptive, intimate and darkly comic, revealing the human cost of the financial crisis by creating a chorus of overlapping voices.

Ryan’s nuanced playfulness with language and the joyous idiom of west of Ireland speech doesn’t dilute the individuality of each character – and in a book of just over 150 pages, there are 21. Their surface wit and spark wrap around the despair at the book’s centre, with its fractured symbol of a flaking, spinning heart, worked in metal on the gate of Bobby’s much-hated father. As the story develops, Ryan stokes up momentum through each voice, leaving off at the point where circumstances spiral violently out of control....Caveats aside, this is a formidable debut, with snatches of the savage comedy of Patrick McCabe and a wistful cadence all its own.