The sequel to The Spinning Heart, this novel won the 2025 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, and the 2024 Irish Novel of the Year. Like TSH, it builds up a portrait of a small Irish town with short chapters, each narrated by one of the inhabitants. Like TSH, it starts with builder Bobby and ends with his wife Triona. It chronicles the aftermath of the murder of Bobby's father and the kidnap of Dylan, Seanie Shaper's son. The first book focused on the effects of the 2008 financial crash and subsequent recession leading to the collapse of Pokey's building firm. This book centres on the corrosive effects of drugs on the small community.
It's been seven years since I read TSH, and I'd remembered my excitement at the style but almost completely forgotten the individual characters, and it wasn't until almost the end of the book when a metal heart spins in the gate of the hose of Bobby's father that I realised the two books were related. They can certainly stand on their own. But it did mean that I had to consciously record the multiple names of the characters and their relationships and it took a long time before I recognised recurrent characters.
Nevertheless, I love this 'mosaic' style of narration.
And there is a lot going on. The plot is perhaps not as clearly shaped as TSH, which has the murder and kidnap centre-stage, but there's a lot of incidents, plenty to keep the reader turning the pages, and a general sense of increasing jeopardy.
Where the book excels is as a masterclass in characterisation. The characters are mostly seen through the eyes of others, like a set of 360-degree appraisals. This allows a delightful tension between the way a character sees themselves - and aren't we all unreliable narrators? - and the 'truth' of them. It also allows an interplay between moral condemnation on the one hand and forgiveness or at least acceptance on the other.
And above all, the picture that is jigsawed together creates a compelling picture of today's small-town Ireland, rising free from the old tropes. In particular, the twin dominances of the church and the bar seem to have faded, leaving the building trade and the drugs trade as masters of the field.
The other great strength of this book, as with so many Irish novels, is the glory of the language.
Selected quotes:
- "That feeling like my ears and eyes are being strained by something in my brain, being pushed out against the edges of themselves." (Bobby)
- "I don't know in the fuck why I went on Seanie Shaper's brother's stag. I thought I had to, I suppose. Colum is a good skin, and I thought the lads would think I was a dry balls if I didn't go." (Bobby)
- "One of those big low houses that was built on a foundation of bribes and bullshit back in the eighties." (Josie)
- "It's a licence to print money, Dad, he said. He knows I hate that kind of auld foolish talk, the suggestion that a man can defy the simple equation that has effort on the one side and reward on the other." (Josie)
- "The only man I ever loved, and he one half of a gorilla and one half of a bull and two ends of a bastard." (Lily)
- "I could tell by the shift in his features, his probing expression, that he was searching for the truth of me and concealing the truth of himself." (Vasya)
- "Your one had a face like a bulldog chewing a scorpion." (Realtin)
- "You're only ever one step from disaster, one fuck-up from shitting in a bucket in a cage with an arse bandit smiling at you, holding your jacks roll, telling you to make sure you wipe it nice and clean." (Jason)
- "Her cooking, too, is much improved. Or maybe my palate has atrophied." (Lloyd)
- "You get used to reading the tides of men." (Denis)
- "Like the church in Nenagh that was only meant to be half the size but the builders were given the plans for a cathedral by mistake." (Denis)
- "I heard a long keening sound echo off the handball alley wall and realized it had come from me." (Mags)
- "It's hard to be a policeman, these days. ... Every bigmouth ball-scratching do-nothing bastard watching their every move and filming it or writing about it on their mobile telephones and every other gom with their mouth open reading all about it." (Jim)
- "I was able always to add my instinct and intuition to me received intelligence, putting it together like a collage of tiny bits to form the clearest picture of the truth of things." (Jim)
First published in GB by Doubleday in 2024
My Penguin paperback was issued in 2025
This review was written by
the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling
and The Kids of God
Other fiction by Irish authors reviewed in this blog may be found here.
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