"Fierce love, loyalty, and life going on in the aftermath of loss, this glorious story of four generations of Irish women gets under your skin as an immersive joy."
Raw, beautiful, and lucidly poetic Donal Ryan’s The Queen of Dirt Island leaves its imprint on body, soul and heart as it tells the stories of four generations of women who live under the same roof in rural County Tipperary from the 1980s.
These women are warriors – a magnificently unconventional, outspoken clan of Nana Mary, daughter-in-law Eileen, and granddaughter Saoirse, who’s born on the day her father and paternal grandfather are killed.
Revealing the love that binds and nourishes the women through dramas and tragedies, and told in short vignettes, it’s a haunting novel of pride and bone-deep loyalty with a pull that sneaks up on you. You start off on the outside, looking into a raucous family, feeling intrigued, surprised, trying to make sense of how they function. Then, before you know it, you feel like a faithful insider who’d defend the women to the hilt.
There’s much sadness in their lives. Eileen was disowned by her father and brother for having a child outside marriage. Saoirse too falls pregnant at a young age, but in her case there are no men judging her or casting her out. She and baby Pearl are supported by her mother and Nana, and the four of them survive on love and loyalty, even as life hurls more upset at them.
As an example of their spirit, when Eileen is betrayed by underhand legal dealings around family-owned land, her fabulous response is to assert herself as Queen of Dirt Island with due flamboyance – “Fuck this” she utters before adorning film-star glasses. Meanwhile, Saoirse later rights a wrong done to her by a would-be writer boyfriend in a satisfying stroke of self-created justice.
Honest and stirring, with perfect dialogue and observations, this shockingly good tempest of a novel explores the deepest of bonds and the stories that bind us.
| Primary Genre | General Fiction |
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From the award-winning, Booker longlisted author of the number one bestseller, STRANGE FLOWERS, a searing, jubilant novel about four generations of women and the love and stories that bind them.
The Aylward women are mad about each other, but you wouldn't always think it. You'd have to know them to know - in spite of what the neighbours might say about raised voices and dramatic scenes - that their house is a place of peace, filled with love, a refuge from the sadness and cruelty of the world.
Their story begins at an end and ends at a beginning. It's a story of terrible betrayals and fierce loyalties, of isolation and togetherness, of transgression, forgiveness, desire, and love. About all the things family can be and all the things it sometimes isn't. More than anything, it is an uplifting celebration of fierce, loyal love and the powerful stories that last generations.
The Queen of Dirt Island features in the following genres: General Fiction, Star Books, Family Drama, Historical Fiction, Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Sagas, Narrative theme: Coming of age, Narrative theme: Love and relationships, Narrative theme: Identity / belonging, Fiction, Recommendations, Fiction: narrative themes, Literary Fiction, Literary Fiction
The Queen of Dirt Island is available in Paperback, Hardback
The Queen of Dirt Island was written by Donal Ryan and published by Penguin (Transworld) an imprint of Transworld Publishers Ltd
The Queen of Dirt Island has 243 pages
£8.99
