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.