Dooneen

The astonishing Irish literary magician Keith Ridgway pulls from his hat the 21st-century’s Great Dublin Novel

A New Yorker Best Book of 2026

Bartholomew Port, known to all as Mew, steps into the bushes in a London park and steps out of the bushes in a Dublin one. Not only that―there are no cars; there are moving footpaths; there is no church; everything seems quite queer. Home by invitation, he has arrived in a Dublin that is alive with song, with rumor, with tunnels, with ghosts, and with an unmistakable sense of insurgency. In this suspiciously timeless city that breathes an old revolutionary air, Mew fiercely misses his beloved Mootie, back home in London. An unraveling, an impossibility, a gathering of voices, and a single dream, Dooneen is the layered, allusive and wildly original new novel from Keith Ridgway, “one of Ireland’s best writers, in a country with no shortage of them” (The Times).

Keith Ridgway is a Dubliner living in London. His previous novels include A Shock (winner of the 2022 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction), Hawthorn & Child, and Animals. He has also been awarded the Prix Fémina Étranger and Premier Roman Étranger, the O Henry Award, and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His books have been acclaimed "ingeniously slippery” (Lucy Scholes, New York Times Book Review),  “bleak, hilarious, chilling and hopeful” (Louie Conway, Vanity Fair), and "like Finnegans Wake, only readable” (John Self, London Times).