Donal Ryan shares a few words about his new book, Heart, be at Peace.
Heart, be at Peace is its own book, and a different story, but its voices will be familiar to people who have read The Spinning Heart. When I wrote that novel in 2010 I didn’t really expect that anyone would ever read it. My main literary ambition was to finish two novels, and to keep them as evidence that I was, for a while at least, ‘a proper writer.’
After The Spinning Heart was published in 2012 in a co-publishing arrangement between The Lilliput Press and Doubleday I started to panic a little bit. If I’d known it would have an audience I’d have been more careful about it. I’d have made sure that the stories were more surely resolved at the end, and that readers would know that Bobby Mahon, at least, was okay. I’d been very pleased with my ambiguity and my resoluteness about not having neatly tied-up endings: this was after all a portrait of a community, a chorus of individuals describing their reality; this was no place, I thought, for pat conclusions. But readers seemed to worry about the characters. I was often asked, ‘How’s Bobby? Where is he now?’ My mother told me that people asked her about the characters as she worked her till in Tesco Nenagh. She pretended to be annoyed but really she loved it. She knew those characters almost better than I did. She told me that I had to write a follow-up. I just wish I’d done it in time for her to read it. I think she’d have liked, Heart, be at Peace. I think that she’d have been proud of it, as I am, and I know that she’d have been grateful to its readers, as I am. Thanks, from us both.
You can shop for Heart, be at Peace on our website.
