Donal Ryan’s books of the year

Author of The Spinning Heart

I have only read a fraction of the books I wanted to this year, but there were some gems. In Billy Keane's The Ballad of Mo & G (Liberties Press), heartbreak and comedy, tenderness and savagery meld into a beautiful, mad narrative delivered in a voice that's completely real. I could not put it down.

Alison Jameson's Little Beauty (Doubleday Ireland) is a starkly beautiful and haunting work, a precise and unsentimental tale of a "fallen" woman in an island community.

Paul Lynch combines wonderfully inventive use of language and cinematic vision in Red Sky in Morning (Quercus) to create a startlingly original page-turner.

In Between Dog and Wolf (Lilliput Press) Elske Rahill presents a darkly compelling triptych of crystalline portraits of undergraduate students struggling in early adulthood.

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Stay Where You Are and Then Leave by John Boyne (Doubleday Children's Books) is the best kind of children's book: one that has universal appeal. I'm glad books like this are in my children's futures.

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