Funny, moving and beautifully written

Filled with light and shade, love and tragedy ... if it was a song you could sing it

It’s furious, it’s moving, it’s darkly funny, it punches you right in the gut, the writing is effortlessly wonderful, and every one of the wide variety of voices rings utterly true.

Donal Ryan is the real deal … A brilliantly realised, utterly resonant state-of-the-nation landscape

Donal Ryan’s precise and evocative debut … is a textured account of a community as it was during a brief moment of time. … unexpectedly tender … Ryan’s prism of life and lives is compellingly humane. … This is an exciting, relevant and believable contemporary novel about the lost and the wounded that listens to the present without discarding either the sins of the fathers or the literary legacy of the past.

There’s a powerful sense of place and shared history binding Ryan’s many voices, their inner and outer selves, distilling a linguistic richness comparable to Under Milk Wood. . . . Ryan’s novel . . . seems to draw speech out of the deepest silences; the testimony of his characters rings rich and true – funny and poignant and banal and extraordinary – and we can’t help but listen.

Powerful and affecting . . . [a] superb, unforgettable and topical debut.

Humane, funny, moving and relevant, this is extremely impressive stuff.

A formidable debut, with snatches of the savage comedy of Patrick McCabe and a wistful cadence all its own.

[A] beguiling debut. … This may be the work of a debut novelist, but it is one who reads plenty and knows his business. … His salty, damaged characters give voice to the anger and heartache of a town snared by Ireland’s collapse. For this, we are in his debt.

I was hugely impressed by The Spinning Heart. There will be many novels which explore the effect of the crash on the people of Ireland but I can't imagine a more original, more perceptive or more passionate work than this. Outstanding.

Most beautifully written and plotted. What a writer! It is amazing to read about such grief and pain and yet end up elevated by the quality of the writing. A wonderful book.

…a first novel that's … up-to-date in its concerns but that also transcends the merely topical in its bleak, if often savagely funny, vision of a rural Ireland … There are echoes … of Patrick McCabe's stray sod country, though Tipperary-born Donal Ryan has an imaginative insight into his characters that's all his own and a furious energy to his prose that gives arrestingly vivid life to these blighted souls. … a darkly persuasive debut.

Funny, moving, technically inventive … serves as a microcosm for Ireland in the aftermath of the financial crisis. … Structurally the novel gestures to William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, while Ryan’s sensitive observations on Irish life seem responsive to the work of his compatriot Patrick McCabe. That Ryan does not look out of place in such literary company is a measure of his achievement.

The portrait of a whole town facing sudden crisis naturally packs quite a punch. Even so, the most impressive aspect of this overwhelmingly impressive novel is the sheer quality of those 21 narrations. … The unambiguous announcement of a genuine and apparently fully-formed new talent.

Beautifully written… extraordinary reading… captured the essence of the sad part of what’s happening in Ireland. This book just got me by the throat. A stunning, stunning read… It comes with the highest imaginable endorsement from me... A modern literary masterpiece.

The most significant book to come out of Ireland since Angela’s Ashes … has the smack of authenticity. I’ve read many good books this year – new and old – but this is my book of 2012.

It is hard to believe that such beautiful but controlled writing could come from a debut author, but The Spinning Heart is just that. Each chapter is narrated by a unique voice from one member of an Irish community, building by the end of this slim novel a precise and fully formed portrait of the devastation of the financial crash on both a personal, private and public level. It is full of warmth and wit, but is also a haunting and a complex story. There’s murder, adultery, scamming and gossiping, alongside love and heartbreak, in this perceptive gem of a novel.

Quinn brings the period in question vividly to life: his research is exemplary, and his subject absorbing

All the ingredients of an upmarket page-turner

Ambitious, gripping and disturbingly well done

Beyond its splendid feel for the era’s chat and patter, the novel pits philanthropy and opportunism, ideals and selfishness, bracingly at odds

This novel is refreshingly different and contains a cornucopia of wonderful material and evocative descriptions

The best book I’ve read in ages… You have to read it.