Heart be at Peace by Donal Ryan
It’s over ten years since I read ‘The Spinning Heart’ by Donal Ryan and I can still remember it. For me, it was a few pages in and already I felt like I’d wandered into a quiet room full of ordinary people whispering truths. Over a decade later, the author returns to that same small village, its wounds still humming beneath the surface, with ‘Heart, Be At Peace’ — a follow-up not in the traditional sense, but in tone, spirit, and shared breath. It’s a gentle, lyrical novel that doesn’t shout for your attention, but earns it in the spaces between the lines.
Returning to Familiar Ground
Set in the same rural community as The Spinning Heart, Ryan’s new novel picks up with the next generation, but the ghosts of the past linger. That earlier novel gave us a chorus of voices in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, each one raw with loss and longing. Here, time has moved on, but not everything has healed. The rhythms of the language are still unmistakably Ryan — sparse, musical, never a word wasted.
It feels like sitting at a kitchen table in rural Tipperary, mug of tea in hand, and hearing someone slowly tell you what they can’t quite say out loud. There’s something sacred in the restraint.
Style and Substance
Anyone familiar wit the man’s work will know there’s a deceptive simplicity to Ryan’s prose. He writes like someone who trusts the reader. There are no fireworks, no posturing. He doesn’t push the emotional weight onto you; instead, it slips under your skin when you’re not looking.
Heart, Be At Peace isn’t so much a sequel as a return to a world we were never finished with. The characters carry secrets, regrets, and tenderness with them, and as always with Ryan, there’s a deep humanity in every paragraph. He writes about people you feel you might pass on a country road, or sit beside at mass.
The structure is the same as the previous novel - each character has a chapter, 21 in all. There are stories that run through the book, and we hear snippets from each of the characters that help to piece things together. This chronological structure works well, and he weaves everything together beautifully so you barely notice the seams.
There were times in the book when a name was mentioned and I had to cast my mind back. It was usually about a character from earlier in the book, and it made me think, but it worked because it kept me engaged with the work.
It’s like living in a small town, and you’ll hear a snippers of information at the shop, on the street, in the pub, at the chapel.
You have to put it all together yourself.
Lyricism and Awareness
One line, in particular, rang in my ears long after I put the book down: “The heart remembers even what the head forgets.” It’s not just a beautiful line; it’s like a thesis for the whole novel. This for me is very a story about memory, legacy, and the quiet ache of trying to do right by the past.
I kept thinking, too, about how the book echoed a kind of non-dual awareness. The moments of presence, of being with grief without trying to fix it, of noticing the land, the silence, the spaces between words. It’s a deeply Irish kind of mysticism — unspoken but always felt.
Familiar Faces
It’s a quiet joy to be reunited with a few familiar faces, not least Bobby Mahon — the broken-hearted soul at the centre of The Spinning Heart. There’s something profoundly moving about meeting him again all these years later, his pain no longer raw but folded into the shape of a life still being lived. Donal Ryan doesn’t dramatise these returns; he lets them breathe, and we’re invited simply to witness where time and tenderness have carried them.
Bobby is deeply troubled. He’s still in the building trade, but he’s worried about the appearance of an incriminating photo of him doing the rounds on whatsapp. But there’s a deeper rage rumbling inside him, this time caused not by his father or unscrupulous property developers, but by a scourge that will be familiar to parents of teenagers the country wide - drugs. Bobby has his eye on a couple of local lads dealing outside the school, and can’t understand why no one is doing anything about it. Maybe it’ll be left to him.
Other characters reappear too — some steadied by the passing years, others still quietly aching with the weight of old griefs or small joys not yet spoken aloud. There’s a lovely sense of accumulation, of a community still weathering the same winds, but with slightly different postures now. It’s not nostalgia — it’s grace. And it reminds you that no one’s story ever really ends, they just keep unfolding in the hearts of those who care enough to listen.
Themes
Looking through my blog, I’m surprised there’s only one Donal Ryan book review here - The Queen of Dirt Island. It surprises me because looking at his previous releases, I’ve read the majority of them. Odd, but the majority must predate this blog.
Anyway, I’m a huge fan of his work because his books always feel so reflective of Irish life. Grief, loneliness, mental illness, intergenerational trauma, economic collapse - he’ll go there. But the one thing that probably stands out in his work is the compassion that he has for his characters.
If I have one little qualm, it’s that the resolution to one of the main storylines was maybe a bit too tidy for my liking. It certainly didn’t impact my enjoyment of the novel, and others may feel differently.
Summary
If you loved The Spinning Heart, you owe it to yourself to read this. But even if you haven’t, Heart, Be At Peace stands on its own. It’s a slow-burning, richly human story that reflects the quiet, moral complexity of rural life.
This isn’t a book that hands you revelations. It nudges you. And in a world that seems increasingly full of noise and certainty, that nudge feels like grace.
208 pages, Paperback
Published
August 8, 2024 by Penguin
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