The winner of the Guardian First Book Award features a chorus of voices telling the story of an Irish village undergoing a post-recession crisis and evokes Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, right down to a section narrated by a recently deceased character. At the center is Bobby Mahon, a building foreman who discovers, as the book opens, that his boss has "shafted" him and his coworkers, cheating them of a pension and disappearing after the housing boom goes bust. Bobby's decency is admired by everyone, and it underpins the novel: the belief in Bobby's good nature seems to unite these people, to serve as a salve on the wounds of economic collapse. As rumors spread that Bobby is having an affair and that he has killed his loathed father, and as a child disappears, the villagers will need to marshal their faith in him. Equal parts mournful and hopeful, the book pays keen attention to the ways lives coalesce and fall apart in time of personal and national crises. Even as some of the voices seem extraneous, added for color but little else, Ryan has created a faithful portrait of a time and place in his debut novel, but his truest accomplishment lies in the fact that, though the individual accounts add up to a greater whole, each story stands on its own. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Ryan's debut novel explores the devastating aftermath of Ireland's recent economic collapse. In a small, predominately working-class town, a community comes apart at the seams following the failure of a crooked construction company (the town's primary source of employment). People turn on one another as they struggle to find meaning in the new reality of material scarcity and joblessness. Bitterness and mistrust rule the day, as old scores are settled and long-simmering tensions rise to the surface. A different character narrates each chapter, and the same incidents and memories are viewed through different lenses. Woven through each chapter is the story of Bobby, a well-respected, hardworking father and husband whose current family drama is revealed in bits and pieces through the eyes of the various characters. Although the subject matter is overwhelmingly bleak, the prose is lyrical, and the voices are authentic. Flashes of humor and tenderness shine through as well, as the helplessness and frustration of an era is effectively captured through the lives of these small-town residents.--Price, Kerri Copyright 2010 Booklist

It is the early 2000s in Ireland. The Celtic Tiger has vanished along with the country's prosperity, and Pokey Burke, the boss of a building crew in an unnamed, rural Irish town, has absconded with his employees' pensions. Burke's foreman, Bobby Mahon, contemplates murdering his father as he ekes out a living by taking odd jobs. The town both respects and resents Bobby, for he possesses a capacity for suffering that fills their hearts and yet makes them feel small. After Burke disappears, other tragedies further rend the social fabric of the community, and these events break hearts and revive old hurts. Are these crimes random? Or is Bobby somehow connected? Either way, Mahon's neighbors and friends condemn him with gossip in an attempt to save themselves from death. VERDICT Altogether 21 different characters narrate 21 chapters to relate Bobby Mahon's fall from grace, with Ryan showing himself to be a virtuoso stylist as he credibly conveys the viewpoints of men and women of all ages in language distinct from one section to the next. Winner of Ireland's Newcomer of the Year and Book of the Year, this startling debut reads like a modern Irish twist on William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.-John G. Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

IN DONAL RYAN'S compact debut novel, "The Spinning Heart," effects of the economic downturn ripple through an Irish village whose laborers, flush during the boom, have been left in the lurch now that the local developer, Pokey Burke, has skipped town. The spinning heart of the title, a decorative ornament on a cottage gate, "skewered on a rotating hinge," is an apt image both for the town's collective heartache and for the narrative progression, which moves continuously from one villager to the next, 21 narrators (and chapters) in all. Each speaker has been wounded - by the economy as well as by grim parents, cruel lovers, violence, mental illness and the grief of accidental loss. At the book's figurative heart is the construction foreman Bobby Mahon, a young husband and father whose moral decency anchors the story. Both his goodness and his brogue lend the novel an old-fashioned, storybook quality ("He drank out the farm to spite his father") that overlaps convincingly with mentions of Facebook, "prefab" doors and dubious investments in Dubai to create an affecting portrayal of contemporary rural Ireland. With the barest thread of a story line, the book suggests an intimate oral history of a moment in time, its rotation of voices - sharing regrets and desires along with town gossip - reminiscent of William Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying" and Edgar Lee Masters's "Spoon River Anthology." Instead of Masters's cemetery, these individuals populate a metaphorical ghost town, haunted by the dead, the departed and phantom prospects that have vanished overnight. Indeed, one character, the young single mother Realtin, lives in a "ghost estate" - an empty residential development where she is stuck with a hefty mortgage and an unfinished house. The extensive cast spins variations on a theme, "sodden stories" of fathers who terrorize their wives and children, and mothers who rack up pregnancies for the government's monthly 150 euros per child. While the material often feels familiar (we even meet the kindhearted town floozy, now aging and abandoned), Ryan writes with compassion, honesty and an appealing deadpan humor, as when one unfortunate character confesses, "The biggest mistake I made when I was younger was getting tattoos all over my face." These are men and women with hard lives and soft hearts, many speaking in lively, unaffected idiom. "My tear bags are fierce close to my eyes these days," the father of Pokey Burke says. When the vernacular risks wearing out its welcome, Ryan intersperses more plain-spoken narrators like Vasya, a laborer from Siberia now left to scrounge for work. We hear Vasya's fully articulated thoughts rather than the broken English he speaks, allowing for wonderful descriptions of, for instance, "a city that was spreading outwards like a dirty puddle." I felt some alarm when I realized I would continue to meet one new narrator after the next for the entire book, like a long receiving line at a party - but it is to the author's credit that I rarely had to check back to keep everyone straight. There is also the pleasant anticipation of wondering how each new character will fit into Ryan's mosaic. Most chapters are brief and hit similar notes, each speaker summarizing what has occurred, with predrawn conclusions that quell dramatic tension and limit the story's elasticity. Even when a kidnapping and a murder are introduced, the information arrives secondhand, so that we witness few actual scenes and little dialogue or action. But perhaps this lack of true forward motion is the point. These people have been left in a rut, spinning their wheels as well as their hearts. Depression has caused them to lose their former sense of themselves. One older character, longing for "a time when killing was for good, for God and country," reflects: "That time is long gone. But aren't we still the same people?" DAPHNE KALOTAY is the author of the novels "Russian Winter" and "Sight Reading."

Irish author Ryan's debut takes readers to the "heart" of hardscrabble life in Ireland in the era after the economic boom and bust of 2008. The novel received Book of the Year honors at the Irish Book Awards. Reminiscent of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, this book gives readers a story--or rather stories--told from multiple perspectives, each chapter using a different voice. The initial encounter is with Bobby Mahon, a builder who's been burned by the economic machinations of Pokey Burke. Bobby is married to Triona and is generally looked up to by everyone as an honest man, showing rare integrity in a world of rascals and swindlers. Later, we find out that he had been having an affair with Raltn, though Triona was so in love that his peccadillos didn't matter. At the core of Bobby's existence is his hatred for his father, a man who frittered away the family inheritance and constantly belittled his son. Through other characters later in the novel, readers find out that Bobby has supposedly murdered the old man. Is it true? The composite picture from these memories and anecdotes is bleak indeed. Readers learn of Raltn's groping by her egregious boss; Timmy's having been flattened by a shovel by an irate victim of Pokey's real estate fraud; Seanie Shaper's constant desire for women; a reminiscence from beyond the grave by Bobby's father; and finally there's Triona's calm, earth-mother voice and a moving meditation that ends, "What matters only love?" Disturbing and unnerving but ultimately beautiful.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.