From a Low and Quiet Sea

Praise

“Exquisitely rendered, with raw anguish sublimated into lyrical prose… [Ryan] weaves his three protagonists’ deceptively discrete trajectories together, creating a triptych of poignant and at times haunting stories.”—The Washington Post

“Donal Ryan writes within the venerable tradition of vernacular Irish literature, fashioning prose of spare, rough-cut beauty from the speech and thoughts of the working class… Ryan has a sensitive feel for the process of atonement, the gradual shifts in the human heart that steer his characters from wrongdoing or despair toward some form of redemption.”—Wall Street Journal

“Ryan writes with brilliant empathy about those in between.”—The Boston Globe

“Gorgeous prose, sentences that go on in an often Joycean fashion, association upon association, providing deep insight into each character… This is a book that comes alive even more when it’s reread, when the connections are known. Our separate lives, Ryan seems to be saying, are linked in ways we so often don’t recognize… we’re all connected.”—Ploughshares

“Cunningly structured and deeply compassionate… When Ryan steps back to allow the connections among their stories to emerge in a relatively short final section, the effect is dazzling, like a series of fireworks building with each detonation.”—Booklist 

“This is a superb novel.”—John Boyne, The Guardian

“An engrossing, unpredictable, beautifully crafted novel; Donal Ryan is giving us characters – their angles and their language – that we haven’t seen in Irish literature before.”—Roddy Doyle

“It’s a beautiful, luminous kind of piece – full of mystery, compassion, woven with such skill; heartbreaking and restorative. I will carry these splintered men around with me for a long time, along with the women who have loved them.”—Rachel Joyce, New York Times bestselling author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
 
“From a Low and Quiet Sea is not only very cleverly constructed, but deeply moving too. I loved it.”—Louis de Bernières, bestselling author of Corelli’s Mandolin



Praise for All We Shall Know

“So fine is this novel, and so purely told, that it establishes Mr. Ryan as the heir apparent to the late, great Irish stylists John McGahern and William Trevor… There are countless passages… that are so sculpted and beautiful that one’s lips begin to shape their words unbidden, the way a song can move a crowd to its rhythm.”—Wall Street Journal

“A dwarf star of a novel: small, dark, impressively dense… All We Shall Know makes a novel about the heaviness of existence into something that is even, and easy — and, at times, perfect, and right.”—Boston Globe

“[A] haunting, beautifully written story.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer

“An extraordinary portrait of adultery, loneliness and betrayal . . . One of the finest writers working in Ireland today . . .in the great tradition of tragic fiction, his lonely adulteress coming to grief in the same shadowy spaces as Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina.”—John Burnside, Guardian

“[All We Shall Know] is a novel of self-sacrifice, penance, and circumscribed possibilities for happiness, narrated with great compassion and written with elegant lyricism. . . Emotionally intense, deeply engaging, and profound.”—Kirkus 

“A lush and lively novel that fascinates from its opening words to its tender last lines.”—Publishers Weekly

“Rich in the cadence of both the rural Irish vernacular and the Traveller mash-up of English and the Cant. [All We Shall Know] captures the turbulence of marriage, love, sex, class and violence–while leaving room for the big Irish heart that lies behind so much great literature in English.”—Shelf Awareness