All We Shall Know - Hardcover

Ryan, Donal

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0857524372 ISBN 13: 9780857524379

Publisher: Doubleday, 2016

Synopsis

‘Martin Toppy is the son of a famous Traveller and the father of my unborn child. He’s seventeen, I'm thirty-three. I was his teacher. I’d have killed myself by now if I was brave enough. I don’t think it would hurt the baby. His little heart would stop with mine. He wouldn't feel himself leaving one world of darkness for another, his spirit untangling itself from me.’
Melody Shee is alone and in trouble. Her husband doesn't take her news too well. She doesn't want to tell her father yet because he’s a good man and this could break him. She’s trying to stay in the moment, but the future is looming – larger by the day – while the past won’t let her go. What she did to Breedie Flynn all those years ago still haunts her.
It’s a good thing that she meets Mary Crothery when she does. Mary is a young Traveller woman, and she knows more about Melody than she lets on. She might just save Melody’s life.
Donal Ryan’s new novel is breathtaking, vivid, moving and redemptive.

About this title

Review:

"Donal Ryan's new book is an enthrallingly impassioned and compassionate read, ferocious but humane. All We Shall Know acknowledges the acts of vicious self-destruction the human heart is capable of, but does not accept the irreparability of such acts. To his raw, wounded and grieving characters Donal Ryan says: If you are still breathing, you can be redeemed." (Colin Barrett)

"I read it with enormous pleasure. He is a remarkably imaginative and beautiful user of the language. This book is very moving and true. I love the truth in his work." (Jennifer Johnston)

"All We Shall Know is really very good. All that we've come to expect from Donal: great humanity and an uncanny sense of place but this time – and at last! – we have a man writing from a woman's point of view in a totally convincing and non-patronising way." (Christine Dwyer Hickey)

"An extraordinary portrait of adultery, loneliness and betrayal . . . One of the finest writers working in Ireland today . . . worthy of Greek drama . . . . . . 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)

"A joy to read, for all that it breaks your heart . . . builds on [Ryan’s] reputation for cramming generations of grief and disappointment into less than 200 pages of beautiful prose. . . . He has also created two female character – cussed and brave, vulnerable and cruel – who come together to repair the past and stitch together a possible future." (Katy Guest Independent)

Book Description:

The much anticipated new novel from the acclaimed author of The Spinning Heart and The Thing About December.

About this edition

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0857524372
• ISBN 13: 9780857524379
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 192