Heart Be At Peace by Donal Ryan

 Heart Be At Peace

 by Donal Ryan


Heart be at Peace was published on 8th August by Doubleday. My thanks to the author and the publisher for sending me a review copy and to Random Things Tours for inviting me to take part on the tour.




Synopsis

Some things can send a heart spinning; others will crack it in two.

In a small town in rural Ireland, the local people have weathered the storms of economic collapse and are looking towards the future. The jobs are back, the dramas of the past seemingly lulled, and although the town bears the marks of its history, new stories are unfolding.

But a fresh menace is creeping around the lakeshore and the lanes of the town, and the peace of the community is about to be shattered in an unimaginable way. Young people are being drawn towards the promise of fast money whilst the generation above them tries to push back the tide of an enemy no one can touch…




My Review

I have to be honest this took me a while to get the gist of and I was torn between putting it down and persevering. Fortunately I persevered and found myself being drawn into the lives of this story told in 21 voices. It was this that I struggled with at first as each chapter is short and told by a different person so that for the first fifty or so pages I was trying to remember who had said what and from what angle before. 

However, once I got my head round who was who , living with who , related to who, and observing who I got it and started to build up in my head the little community that was being pulled apart by this evilness.

The concept of telling it from different points of view in the community is clever as you get to build up your knowledge and understanding from all perspectives and this rarely happens in a book. There are  people who are out for their own gains, those who are sucked into it at differing ages and those who are trying to stop it happening and ruining the lives and the community that they live in. 

The ending will get you thinking and you will ask yourself how and why and will ask yourself what feelings you have depending on whose perspective you look at it from.

A clever concept of a book.



About the Author



DONAL RYAN is an award-winning author from Nenagh, County Tipperary, whose work has been published in over twenty languages to major critical acclaim. The Spinning Heart won the Guardian First Book Award, the EU Prize for Literature (Ireland), and Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards; it was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Desmond Elliott Prize, and was voted 'Irish Book of the Decade'. His fourth novel, From a Low and Quiet Sea, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2018, and won the Jean Monnet Prize for European Literature. His novel, Strange Flowers, was voted Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, and was a number one bestseller, as was his most recent novel The Queen of Dirt Island, which was also shortlisted for Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. Donal lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Limerick. He lives with his wife Anne Marie and their two children just outside Limerick City.





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