DONAL RYAN'S CAREER SPIN

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The Booker-nominated writer's debut The Spinning Heart is the literary read of the year Kidnap, betrayal, violence, affairs and heartbreak – in Donal Ryan’s début The Spinning Heart tensions are simmering very close to the surface. Taking home Book of the Year at last year’s Irish Book Awards, and recently longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award, Donal Ryan's The Spinning Heart is setting the literary world alight. The novel is set in the wake of the financial crash in rural Ireland. Ryan says that although he did not deliberately set out to write a novel about the recession, “if you set any work of fiction in contemporary Ireland [the economic crash] is going to be a huge factor, it’s unavoidable really. Because it is just everywhere, it permeates every level of society; everyone in Ireland has been affected in some way.”      MORE >