A wonder ... Betrayals beget betrayals as the author leads us through a maze of entwined lives ... Moves with the lightness and felicity of a story collection, sifting relationships built on sand, pummeled by tides of human folly.

[Ryan] is a writer who likes a conceit: a chronological structure to contain the narrative; multiple voices. It is a measure of his skill, and gift for both language and character, that these techniques don’t seem like contrivances, but rather widen the reader’s sense of what a story can be ... Ryan deftly interweaves a larger sense of danger, and an understanding of Ireland’s history, with domestic concerns ... This is Ryan setting up the mechanism of his plot, although it never moves in a linear fashion. We have some work to do, as readers, in mapping the connections between one voice after another—but this is not by any means a failing. It’s a kind of simulacrum of life ... Resolution, if examined closely, is perhaps a little too neat. Overall that doesn’t detract from the rich pleasures of this novel, in which Ryan captures the varieties of Irish English ... There is a sense too, sometimes, of eloquence a little divorced from who these people might actually be ... And yet Ryan reminds us that everyone we meet might be more than our easy assumptions, if we could only know their hearts.

The book can, his publisher says, 'be read independently'. But for the initiated it is fascinating to catch up with characters we last saw 12 years ago ... Ryan dives deep into his characters’ hopes and grievances, drawing out their voices with such precision that you can almost hear their breath between words. He is as confident writing from the perspective of a teenage girl as he is from that of a retired policeman. His characters’ thoughts are not original but they are authentic and resonant ... Ryan’s prose is poetic but never florid, the book’s pacing is perfect and the well-controlled plot has us holding on for revelation and an unpredictable denouement ... Ryan’s faith in redemption is on a par with Dostoyevsky’s in Crime and Punishment ... The only caveat is that Ryan’s novel should have been longer. Several characters warrant more than one chapter and the story could have returned to them. But it seems likely that Ryan agrees and is not finished with writing about his fictional community ... With any luck we will be back in this small place of vast intrigue to pick up with its people again a decade from now.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of Donal Ryan’s writing is the scope of his vision. His books are generational in that they reflect the great variety of life ... An absorbing, empathetic story of a community in trouble ... Ryan gets the tricky act of the sequel just right...while an undertow of present time menace drives the plot forward ... This same judiciousness can be seen in the storytelling style, which is largely realist with flashes of mysticism that are often grounded in historical significance ... Ryan’s prose is another masterclass in balance, the mix of brutality and poignancy, the push and pull, that sees him get away with lines that could seem overwrought in less capable hands. The panoramic portrait of a rural community in Heart, Be At Peace calls to mind the work of McGahern, specifically his final novel That They May Face the Rising Sun, though Ryan doesn’t write with the same splinter of ice, his approach is more collaborative, compassionate, intimately acquainting the reader with the interiorities of his large cast ... The flow of these voices is perhaps the chief success of the novel, the way the different cadences complement each other, the vignettes that are by turn tragic or hopeful, and all ultimately linked. Bar the voice of Lloyd, whose foray into writing indulgently echoes some of Ryan’s own stories, they all offer something to the whole. The standout, for me, was a beautifully spare account of an older woman robbed in her bed at night, but each reader will have their own favourite, which is one of the reasons polyphonic narratives are so compelling. It’s the literary equivalent of a rollercoaster where the emotional swings in register make for a wild ride ... Unlike a lot of literary writers, he is excellent at endings, and the build and climax of the novel, the way the screws are tightened dramatically, make for a suspenseful, cathartic finish. Little clues have been given along the way but the reader will be so caught up in the beguiling prose and the inherent momentum of a new story in each of the 21 sections that few will predict the end. Heart, Be at Peace is one of those novels, like Ryan’s ouroboros, that warrants rereading time and again.

The metaphor of a ticking bomb is inescapable, overegged. Yet the most infuriating aspect of this admittedly compulsive novel is how unevenly it distributes the balance between its contrapuntal team of narrators. Some are mere ballast, wheedlingly sentimental... Others are bruisingly alive ... Others are central to the story, but poorly realized: the voice of Vasya, the only non-Irish speaker,—remains romanticized and clichéd, a contrast to the infectious colloquialisms on display elsewhere ... The ambition that fuelled The Spinning Heart does, however, remain. And Donal Ryan has given life to this part of Ireland.

If violence was simmering gently in the earlier novel, now it’s frothing over the sides ... The recapping required to bring us up to speed can feel laboured at times but is more than compensated for by the rough-edged poetry that Ryan spins from his environment ... Occasionally, wordiness gets the better of Ryan.