Full of interesting characters, each with their own chapter. They all tie together to bring a satisfying conclusion to the book. Set in a small Irish town I found this book to be full of community. Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Group for the complementary ARC. This opinion is my own.

I was hooked from the beginning!!
It was amazing and engaging.
I was instantly sucked in by the atmosphere and writing style.
The characters were all very well developed .
The writing is exceptional and I was hooked after the first sentence.

This was the story of a small Irish town, told in a series of interlocking vignettes. As usual with this author, the writing was beautiful. However, I did have trouble keeping track of all 21 characters. Some definitely made more of an impression on me than others.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

I hate to say that I am in the minority. I can honestly say this book is beautifully written and the author certainly brings each chapter's character to life but I haven't read the earlier books and I'm just lost. I picked up on some of the overlap of storylines but after reading 38% of the book, I just don't want to go on.

I love strong characters but in this case I would just get to know one and then the chapter would end. I couldn't get into it, wish I could.

The Mosaic’

In “Heart Be at Peace,” Donal Ryan tells the story of a small Irish village through 21 chapters, 21 different voices. This tightly knit community is portrayed through the perspectives of its various voices, revealing information about everyone's lives as the story unfolds. It takes some effort to put this mosaic together, but it is well worth the effort. This novel revisits the same town and many of the characters featured in Ryan's celebrated 2012 debut, "The Spinning Heart.”

The previous book focused on the town's struggle with a collapsed economy following the Celtic Tiger. Now the new crisis emerging is the escalating influence of illegal drugs. Bobby Mahon, the town’s de facto leader, is growing increasingly frustrated by the dealers' apparent immunity from justice while their influence poisons lives. Lily, a fascinating character known as the town witch, is dismayed to see her young granddaughter falling for the ruthless gang leader. There is a simple-minded ex-con, Trevor, living with his mother in an assisted living facility who is unwittingly storing the contraband. Vasya, “the hobo,” has some wonderfully poetic contemplations out in the wild before his conscience reprehends his involvement:

“… I wonder if ever I’m captured whether I’ll be able to keep myself from speaking the truth, to my captors or to myself, of the foul, thrilling things I’m party to, of the man I’ve allowed myself to become.”

The drug issue is not the only concern. There are all the things that make up life in a small Irish town, the loves, the gossip, the betrayals. Similar to "The Bee Sting" by Paul Murray, we slowly get to know what's really going on as each person's voice sheds light to the bigger picture.

Every one of these characters feels authentic; their voices, their messages, the uncensored way they open up. Many of these characters deserve more exploration and I would not be surprised to see another visit. Although this is wonderful as a stand-alone book, it has been a number of years since I read the first book, and I plan on savoring these back-to-back.

Another brilliant novel from one of Ireland’s most acclaimed writers.

Thank you to the Penguin Group, Viking Penguin, and NetGalley for providing an advance reader copy in exchange for an honest review. #HeartBeatPeace #NetGalley

Heart Be At Peace is a sequence of 21 stories narrated by residents of a small town in Ireland first encountered in Donal Ryan’s first story collection, The Spinning Heart. The difference is the decade between the two, the time between the exciting and profitable Irish economic boom going bust and the slow recovery 10 years later as people work to recover businesses, relationships, lives. These twenty-one people are sometimes related or known to each other in other ways. Their stories may be entwined. There are all sorts of emotions expressed, from love to hate to loathing or indifference. There is a lot of sadness. But, especially because of several women included, there is resilience and strength and love and happiness present too.

Ryan is a wonderful writer. Here he creates a cast of people who will affect you emotionally and intrigue you as you connect them to each other or their earlier selves while reading. Love, pity or despise these individuals, many will grow on you, many will make you think or possibly heave a deep sigh as you finish their tale. I strongly recommend this book of stories to anyone who enjoys well written characters, a strong sense of place and community. While it isn’t a necessity to have read The Spinning Heart in order to appreciate this new book, it might make the experience more complete.


Thanks to Viking and NetGalley for an eARC of this book. This review is my own

I wish going into this novel I knew that this is a book read better as a companion book. It was very difficult for me to connect to the context without knowing the background or how all the characters were connected. There were a few aspects of the book that were emotional, poignant and I enjoyed the writing.

Thank you to Viking for this book.

What a beautiful novel novel to get lost in. Told by a large amounts of different points of view we see into the lives if those in small town Ireland. I loved it.

Real Rating: 3.75* of five

I got a copy of Steerforth Press's hardover of Author Ryan's debut, The Spinning Heart, years ago. I was not a fan. It felt to me like a lightened up, shallowed out, misery porn oratorio. This novel-in-stories (though Viking would not like that description, stories being anathema on the US market) is the thematic and setting follow-on to the first book. It isn't really a sequel because it makes perfect sense, nuance and all, to someone who has never read the first book.

It is, I'm unsurprised to say, written in the same style as the first book, and that is not greatly to my taste. It's not incompetent, or poor, or clumsy. It just...is. For barely over two hundred pages, it's fine, unexciting but fine. Any longer, though, and I'd be mental for need of some kind of verve, some hint of passion for or prejudice against. Like this: “That was always the way in Ireland, he said. You’d be hung for robbing an apple and made king if you robbed a castle.” Or this: “That’s what young ones do once the madness starts coursing through them. It’s a dangerous place in a person’s life, that shadowy path between childhood and adulthood, and it’s pocked and hexed with all sorts of traps and trials.” Or this: “Pokey had a friend from Malta or one of those quare places who was living down near the lake, just back from the foreshore, in one of those big low houses that was built on a foundation of bribes and bullshit back in the eighties.”

No one's ever said, thought, or written that before, have they.

So I found the execution wanting, and was not excited by the extremely short chapters that change viewpoints and function as slighly underdeveloped stories. If you're telling stories making them wgolly their own thing is best...but these are interdependent fragments of a narrative, I think, so neither fish nor fowl. If this was a deliberate choice, an intentional development of storytelling, it did not hit the mark for me. Too much slid past the PoV switches for me to feel fully satisfied.

Others will disagree, and will thoroughly relish all my cavils as features. I'm not warning anyone away from a poor product; your own tastes be your guide, and Kindle up a sample to see what you think of the writing.

For me, this is my last foray into this bit of Irish literature.

This is my second book by Donal Ryan. I loved The Queen of Dirt Island. I loved the writing and the complex characters and the relationship between three generations of women.
Heart Be at Peace is a different kind of novel. There is a chorus of 21 voices, each offering a glimpse of their lives during a period of economic recovery in Ireland. Although it can be read as a stand alone I wish I had read the Spinning Heart first, which gives these characters a broader context.
Most of the voices in Heart Be at Peace are male, and while it felt a little unbalanced, the writing is still beautiful. The structure is interesting, but with so many characters I was never fully engaged.

Stunning prose and a beautiful story about community and what brings people together. I love this author so much. He never fails to capture humanity in such a raw way.

Thanks to Penguin/Viking for this ARC of 'Heart, Be at Peace' by Donal Ryan.

Donal Ryan has previously written expertly about the Ireland of the incipient Celtic Tiger (The Thing About December) and the post-Celtic Tiger crash (The Spinning Heart) and the impact of these local and global changes on small town Ireland. 'Heart Be At Peace' is almost like the third in a trilogy in its setting of the mid-2010s as Ireland is emerging from the calamitous ruin of the 2008 crash and the sins and wounds of that period are being paid for by the people who went through it and stuck around - some who remembered and some who forgot or never knew.

The story of the community is told from multiple viewpoints in a daisy-chain of chapters. 21 characters who are all interconnected through blood, community, or happenstance tell their story and in the telling Ryan builds up the complete picture of the people and what happened in 2008 and the ramifications for people and place. One character has taken responsibility for making right the financial sins of others during that period while others either love or secretly loathe him. Others have learned nothing from the crash and return to that sewer with abandon.

This is the period when Ireland - urban and rural - became awash with Class A drugs and there's an associated menace throughout the novel, from the machinery that sees the product supplied and people enslaved to the opiates and to their suppliers. Official Ireland gives a shrug of the shoulders and the local people boil.

There's a theme of rebirth throughout the novel through the children of these characters. The parents - fathers especially - adore their children (adult and teen/pre-teen), see a path to redemption via them - a way to overcome their own abusive childhood and subsequent trauma - and will do anything to protect their children and the path to redemption.

Once more, Ryan offers such a precise capturing of the small-mindedness of a small Irish community. The delight when someone deemed to be getting above their station or too pious looks like they might be taken down a peg or two. The difficulty in 'escaping.' The impossibility of discretion and privacy in an environment where not only does everyone know everyone else but they know your seed, breed, and generation, but maintain the ability to ignore the grotesque when it's not kicking down your own door.

In some of these chapters and in some of the characters he veers into Patrick McCabe territory and in others he's squarely into the Clare Keegan of 'Small Things Like These' universe of quiet and vicious evisceration of Irish hypocrisy. Stunning.

If Donal Ryan decides to make this a nominal tetralogy and examines the Ireland of 2025 where all of that 21st century trauma is further layered over that small-mindedness and has morphed into xenophobic racism I'll be first in line to read that novel.

This is one of those books that you want to read slowly, because the writing is so beautiful. But besides that, the intertwining stories and characters are engrossing. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.