Ryan specialises in excavating rural and small-town Ireland, uncovering his characters' particularities - their alienation and urge to belong, their capacity for self-deception and love - in piercing, lyrical prose ... Ryan is excellent at dealing with the passage of time; key scenes unfold slowly, years are covered in a few sentences. The effect of this is subtle but consistent, a reminder that individual lives are rich and transient. Like John McGahern's That They May Face the Rising Sun, the novel captures the steadiness and flux of life in rural Ireland - the stories in between the silences, the coexistence of beauty and violence, kindness and cruelty ... Moll remains elusive - less a fully embodied woman than a catalyst for the transformation of those around her. Ryan is particularly discerning when he is inside the heads of Paddy and Kit, who allow him to expose the class and power systems at play in the village ... While Alexander's perspective on his adopted country - wry, bemused, ultimately fond - is part of Strange Flowers' appeal, Josh's whiteness - not impossible but highly improbable - is a stumbling block. When he and Kit first see Josh, Paddy refers to 'the perfect, unblemished whiteness of this strange flower'. But Ryan doesn't really use Josh's whiteness to elaborate on the novel's themes; instead it's a distraction, foregrounded without being fully worked in ... Ryan's prose is as beautiful and haunting as ever ... In rethinking the parable of the prodigal son, in looking at what happens when a ­prodigal returns, Ryan creates an expansive and thought-provoking story that is timeless and fresh. It may begin in the 1970s, but Strange Flowers holds a mirror up to racism in Ireland today.

... slim, quietly powerful ... The working out of the sadness and secrets of this little family is beautifully done, poignant rather than depressing, and ending on a sweet note. As in his past work, Ryan's prose is a miracle of fluidity, of country talk flowing in and out of people's thoughts, capturing the rural Irish soul in its whole essence as brilliantly as any writer ever has.

Ryan writes conspicuously beautiful prose, and he is at his best when he blends the music of rural speech with fiddle-reels of natural description ... The storytelling need not be sentimentalized—Mr. Ryan’s books are usually quite dark—but it is inherently romantic, entrancingly so ... But it is to Mr. Ryan’s credit that he has continually sought to expand his reach ... brings out Mr. Ryan’s most sensuous and emotive writing. Scattered allusions to biblical tales reinforce the feeling that though its specifics are updated, the story in Strange Flowers is as old as civilization. In the final section, Joshua, troubled and misunderstood like his mother, repeats her rejection and flees to London. But the cords of family and place are stronger than distance for Mr. Ryan, and though this is his most expansive novel yet, it is still, at heart, about homecoming.

... shows an exceptionally gifted novelist distancing himself from his characters ... tightly compressed, skillfully whittled down to the point where each word carries far more than its weight ... Evil is held at arm’s length, almost as though the author himself craved the consolation of dwelling upon spotless virtue. But pure-hearted characters often run the risk of appearing lifeless, and so it is with Ryan’s resolute portrayal of 'Black Alex' as a man without a flaw, equated, the reader may uncomfortably conclude, with the Messiah, whose miraculous restoration of a blind man’s vision is the subject of Josh’s first attempt to write a novel ... Filled with tenderness, and written with the quiet lyricism that has put Ryan on the topmost branch of the flourishing tree of contemporary Irish fiction, Strange Flowers has the feel of an intriguingly transitional work, a steppingstone in the career of an adventurous and courageously affirmative novelist.

Ryan has returned with work which rivals anything he has produced before. The strongest passages emerge from his ability to delve and articulate the complexities and inner anguish of the Irish male in particular ... The flow of the book is disrupted at one point by the introduction of Josh’s writings. While slightly out of keeping with overall tone, these passages do serve to demonstrate his escape route from the baggage he feels burdened with in life ... Ryan reaffirms his place amongst Ireland’s greatest wordsmiths. His ability to weave individual words of the English language into a total far beyond the sum of their parts makes this book a delight to submerge oneself into. It is almost certain to be a book read in limited sittings. You live the pain that he has created for his characters. Already been spoken of as a potential Booker Prize nominee, this is a book which more than justifies the hype that accompanies it.

Ryan is a master of the unexpected who looks to take stock characters and situations and upend them in colourful, thoughtful ways...In Strange Flowers, this only partly comes off. The novel is steeped in religion and its inherent moral lessons seep into the narrative, resulting in unwelcome traces of sentimentality and a somewhat hokey feel to proceedings ... This opening line puts us in familiar Ryan territory — cliché that we trust will be made fresh again — but the problem with Strange Flowers is that this doesn’t always pan out ... While the love story between Moll’s son Josh and English girl Honey feels fresh and true, her adulation for his creative writing — a religious parable that echoes the themes of the wider novel — is overdone, with the story itself inserted into the narrative with little finesse ... The points of enjoyment in this book lie in its plot surprises and in the deft way Ryan handles his 'strange flowers' that crop up in unlikely places. Important issues of race, identity, sexuality and class are all worn remarkably lightly. This is something that the author excels at: allowing readers the space to think for themselves on the bigger issues that drive his books ... Elsewhere, the lyricism of the prose can be pitch perfect, placing Ryan among the great writers of rural Ireland such as John McGahern and Mary Lavin, or his contemporaries Claire Keegan and Colm Tóibín ... The natural world is brilliantly showcased throughout ... Ryan’s other success is to pack intense emotion into short scenes, as with Paddy and Kit’s heartbreaking trip to Dublin to look for their daughter. Readers will stay the course for these nuggets, and for the unravelling mysteries of the author’s strange flowers.

Ryan, like taciturn Moll, has come home. This is a novel of the Ireland of his childhood – the hermetic rhythms, ceaseless scrutiny and class hierarchies of village life ... As Ryan describes this 'green and yielding' landscape, his capacity for reverence is on full display. As ever, he builds exquisite sentences, aching to be read aloud. There is wonder to be found in every grove and glade ... A self-confessed 'pretty lazy researcher', Ryan’s inhabitation of Alexander and his son, Joshua, is disappointing. For a novel that so emphatically forefronts not just questions of prejudice, but of blackness and black identity, Strange Flowers achieves little beyond a gestural rendering of village racism ... Ryan is at the vanguard of contemporary Irish fiction’s magnificent resurgence, what Sebastian Barry, the country’s fiction laureate, has celebrated as 'an unexpected golden age of Irish prose writing'. Strange Flowers may be the weakest of Ryan’s novels, but it is still a gorgeously wrought book – compassionate without dissolving into nostalgia.

Ryan is too inventive a craftsman to give us what we expect ... Such narrative misdirection instils a wariness in the reader: every detail is provisional, no viewpoint absolute. Reading Ryan’s lithe prose, with its flowing, vernacular rhythms, we therefore retain a constant criticality, even when the author himself seems to abandon it. Is, we wonder, the idealized relationship between Moll and Ellen as pure as it seems, given their gaping power imbalance? And are the problems in Moll and Alexander’s marriage being replayed in Joshua’s somewhat shmaltzified love-life? Ryan does not address these questions, but his sharp and probing novel gives us the resources to ask them.

Ryan impresses with this gorgeous and meticulous multigenerational family saga ... Ryan’s sentences have a gentle ramble, which, along with the story’s subtle and oblique revelations, may test some readers’ patience. Fans of Sebastian Barry and Anne Enright will love this delicate and lush portrait.