Making her first choice since joining the Eason Book Club on The Pat Kenny Show, today Katherine Lynch made a bold choice – for the second Book Club in a row, the panel will be tackling Irish short stories. This time around, it’s A Slanting of the Sun from Donal Ryan.
An old man looks into the fearful eyes of a burglar left to guard him while his brother is beaten; an Irish priest in a war-torn Syrian town teaches its young men the art of hurling; the driver of a car which crashed, killing a teenage girl, forges a connection with the girl's mother; a squad of broken friends assemble to take revenge on a rapist; a young man sets off on his morning run, reflecting on the ruins of his relationship, but all is not as it seems.
Donal Ryan's short stories pick up where his acclaimed and award-winning novels The Spinning Heart and The Thing About December left off, confronting readers with the human cost of loneliness, isolation, and displacement.
At the heart of these stories, crucially, is how people are drawn to each other and cling on to love, often in desperate circumstances. In haunting and often startling prose, Donal Ryan has captured the brutal beauty of the human heart in all its hopes and failings.
The Book Club will take place on the last Thursday in October, Thursday the 29th. You can listen back to last’s month’s selection, John Boyne’s Beneath the Earth, at the bottom of this post.
