Slanting of the Sun: Stories, A - Hardcover

Ryan, Donal

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1781620253 ISBN 13: 9781781620250

Publisher: Doubleday Ireland, 2015

Synopsis

Eagerly anticipated first collection of short stories from the author of The Spinning Heart and The Thing About December.
     Donal Ryan's short stories pick up where his acclaimed novels The Spinning Heart and The Thing About December left off, dealing with the human cost of loneliness, isolation and displacement. Sometimes this is present in the ordinary, the mundane; sometimes it is triggered by a fatal encounter or a tragic decision. At the heart of these stories, crucially, is how people are drawn to each other and cling on to love, often in desperate circumstances. In a number of the stories, these emotional bonds are forged by traumatic events caused by one of the characters -- between an old man and the frightened young burglar left to guard him which his brother is beaten; between another young man and the mother of a girl whose death he caused when he crashed his car; between a lonely middle-aged shopkeeper and her assistant. Displacement pervades stories involving emigration (an Irish priest in war-torn Syria) or immigration (an African refugee in Ireland). Some of the stories are set in the same small town in rural Ireland as the novels, with names that will be familiar to Donal's readers. In haunting prose, Donal Ryan has captured the brutal beauty of the human heart in all its hopes and failings.

About this title

About the Author

DONAL RYAN is from Nenagh in County Tipperary. His first novel, The Spinning Heart, was published to major acclaim. It won the Guardian First Book Award and the Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards; it was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Desmond Elliott Prize. The Thing About December was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. Donal lives with his wife Anne Marie and their two children just outside Limerick City.

Review

"Donal Ryan's ambition is to evoke the marginal or washed-up existences of people in a global but very non-metropolitan Ireland as the 21st century dawns... He channels their voices with consummate ventriloquism ... Ryan's ear for an authentically crackling colloquialism is as sharp as ever... Ryan's skill with language flicks out slang and abuse with a masterly touch ... his ear is sharply attuned and his sense of irony remains mordant." -- Roy Foster The Irish Times "Donal Ryan, one of our most remarkable writers, has produced a book of short stories of such visceral power that they hit you in the solar plexus. He deals with the dark side of modern Irish life and produces sentences of titanic impact." -- Joe Duffy Irish Mail on Sunday "Outstanding stories ... There's a bracing - indeed, sometimes saving - humour ... and there's a tenderness, too, towards many of the collection's lost souls... Ryan is already such a master of the short form that even when you dread the outcome, you can't stop reading." -- John Boland Irish Independent "Donal Ryan is a heartbreaker, his quicksilver prose laced with ... wistful rhythms ... These breathtaking stories explore human love against an uneasy landscape of violence and desperation... Donal finds hope in dark corners. 'Sky' [is] a story about everything - life, loss and loneliness - but also just about one man's love for his nephew. [The title story's] gentle and redemptive ending leaves you gaping with wonder." Daily Mail "Donal Ryan is a master of the magnetic first line... His faithful subject is rural despair; the poetry of adversity, the baffling fortitude of intrinsically decent people... These are plain-speaking stories, and in spite of the pervasive woe, this plain speech lends itself to blunt, bleak, brilliant humour... Each unit of language has been scrupulously positioned, though the overall effect is of effortlessness... This collection shows Ryan adding his own elastic yet distinctive voice to O'Connor's impeccable tradition." -- Sara Baume The Guardian

About this edition

• Publisher: Doubleday Ireland
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1781620253
• ISBN 13: 9781781620250
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 204