Tag: contemporary fiction

Book Review – Heart, Be at Peace by Donal Ryan @TransworldBooks

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About the Book

Book cover of Heart, Be At Peace by Donal Ryan

Some things can send a heart spinning; others will crack it in two.

In a small town in rural Ireland, the local people have weathered the storms of economic collapse and are looking towards the future. The jobs are back, the dramas of the past seemingly lulled, and although the town bears the marks of its history, new stories are unfolding.

But a fresh menace is creeping around the lakeshore and the lanes of the town, and the peace of the community is about to be shattered in an unimaginable way. Young people are being drawn towards the promise of fast money whilst the generation above them tries to push back the tide of an enemy no one can touch… 

Format: Hardcover (224 pages) Publisher: Transworld Books
Publication date: 8th August 2024 Genre: Contemporary Fiction

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My Review

I first heard about this book when I attended a recording of BBC Radio 4’s Bookclub to listen to Donal talk about his first novel, The Spinning Heart and answer questions from the audience of readers. In response to one reader worried about Bobby’s fate at the end of the book, Donal said they would get reassurance in the sequel.

Like The Spinning Heart, Heart, Be at Peace consists of a series of internal monologues by twenty-one different characters – men and women – each with a distinctive voice.  It’s described by the publishers as a ‘companion novel’ to The Spinning Heart that can be read as a standalone. Personally, I think you get a richer reading experience if you’ve read The Spinning Heart because you’re learning about the continuing impact of events in the earlier book, as well as catching up with characters who are already familiar to you and seeing what they have made of their lives in the intervening years.

For some of the characters, what they’ve made of themselves is not much. Others have come out of their experiences stronger and wiser. Their stories sometimes involve dark themes, such as mental illness and there’s often violence, or its legacy, just under the surface.

Bobby was essentially the ‘hero’ of The Spinning Heart and he has pretty much the same role here. He is almost universally admired by his community. ‘Bobby is one of those rare men who measures himself against the wellbeing of the people around him. If there’s a problem he takes it personally and does his damnedest to solve it.’ He worked hard to help the town recover from the failure of the local building company that was the focus of the first book. He’s a regular visitor to his ailing mother-in-law and a faithful husband, despite seeming evidence to the contrary. He’s also shown forgiveness towards a man who, given the circumstances, you’d think he should hate. Perhaps it’s because Bobby came so close to acting in the same way himself.

Pokey Burke, the man responsible for the bankruptcy of the building company is still around and has found a new outlet for his devious ways, aided by an unwitting dupe. His role as villain of the piece has been usurped by Augie Penrose, the local drug dealer. Bobby feels a responsibility to take action out of fear for his children. In fact the urge to act is so strong it risks taking him down a path he has tried to resist, haunted by the memory of his violent father. As it turns out, there is someone with an even stronger motivation for ridding the community of the purveyors of the vile trade, just one of the many connections between characters and events.

If this sounds like the book is all about Bobby, it’s not. Each of the other characters has something to contribute although, as is to be expected, some resonate more than others. We learn about their hopes and fears, doubts and regrets, their successes and failures. We also get insights into other characters, and to events past and present. There are confessions, revelations and new perspectives. And there’s the odd touch of humour too since, let’s face it, most of us have some funny little ways unique to us.

As in The Spinning Heart, the final voice we hear is Bobby’s wife, Triona, the woman who knows him best. ‘I know what he’s capable of and what’s beyond him. I know his goodness better than he knows it himself.’ Full of compassion and understanding it means the book concludes on a note of optimism.

I appreciate the polyphonic structure of the book may not work for every reader, but it did for me. I felt the characters really came alive on the page even, possibly especially, the flawed ones. My introduction to Donal Ryan’s writing was From A Low and Quiet Sea. Now, having read The Spinning Heart and this book, I’m eager to explore the rest of his back catalogue.

I received a review copy courtesy of Transworld via NetGalley. Heart, Be at Peace is book 7 of my 20 Books of Summer 2024.

In three words: Immersive, authentic, moving
Try something similar: Mouthing by Orla Mackey

About the Author

Author Donal Ryan

Donal Ryan is an award-winning author from Nenagh, County Tipperary, whose work has been published in over twenty languages to major critical acclaim. The Spinning Heart won the Guardian First Book Award, the EU Prize for Literature (Ireland), and Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards; it was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Desmond Elliott Prize, and was voted ‘Irish Book of the Decade’.

His fourth novel, From A Low and Quiet Sea, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award, and won the Jean Monnet Prize for European Literature. His novel Strange Flowers was voted Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, and was a number one bestseller, as was his most recent novel, The Queen of Dirt Island, which was also shortlisted for Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards.

Donal lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Limerick. He lives with his wife Anne Marie and their two children just outside Limerick City.

#Extract The Heron Legacy by Leona Francombe

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My guest today on What Cathy Read Next is Leona Francombe whose novel The Heron Legacy will be published on 25th June 2024. Described as ‘a novel of modern suspense through which history roams freely, its breath still warm’, I’m delighted to be able to bring you an extract from the book which is currently available to request from BookSirens.

About the Book

Sometimes you can actually feel history breathing… even after nine centuries.

Book cover of The Heron Legacy by Leona Francombe

Charles Fontaine returns to Europe to sell his family’s ancestral domain and finds that a twelfth-century legend still haunts the property.

Clues lead him to a parchment relating the curious tale of a village seeress, whose music enchanted a nobleman with shadowy ties to the present-day Fontaine family.

The deeper Charles delves into the mystery, the closer he comes to his own buried past.

Find The Heron Legacy on Goodreads

Extract from The Heron Legacy by Leona Francombe

The Pond

I

Forest… At night it whispered to him from the frontiers of sleep where even dreams feared to go, and he would follow it there, to the places he’d known. On waking, a spicy note of pine sometimes lingered on his cheek, and as he strode to work on the hard pavement of New York City as he used to stride through the trees, it seemed he could feel soft, damp earth underfoot.

When everyone had left the office for the day and the great city glittered into splendor outside his window, he would take the few mementos of his boyhood from their drawer: a Roman coin and three pottery shards; a small rolled-up banner with the family coat of arms; a quartz crystal. He’d study these treasures as if for the first time, close his eyes and sigh, for at that moment the forest wrapped its silence around him like river mist. In those weightless arms he could drift far from the alien world that had eaten at his soul for so long, and he could whisper truthfully, for indeed it seemed so real: I am home!

Charles Fontaine possessed a host of memory-ways for slipping into his past. His uncle’s domain in the Belgian Ardennes was full of them: the steep forests where oak and yew had witnessed centuries of passages and knew Charles’s especially well; the alley of beeches leading to the pond where the herons fished (he could walk that path in a blindfold).

And Villa Antioch, of course.

His grandfather had constructed the fading, turreted retreat in the early 1900s in a particularly remote part of the forest and it still had no neighbors. From the terrace you could look out across an unkempt meadow to the river, and beyond, to the ruins of Blancheron Castle, perched on their lonely ridge.

And then there was the river itself: that moody, unreliable Semois. The tight serpentine wound through sudden fogs and dizzying escarpments and folded epochs between its coils. History grew deep roots here. Its breath was still warm.

A stone bridge spanned the river near Villa Antioch, built by the Romans during their occupation of Gaul. According to the villa’s current tenant, Charles’s uncle, Theodore, a horseman occasionally rode across the bridge at dusk. “It’s your ancestor, lad, Stephen de la Fontaine!” he liked to tell his wide-eyed nephew of an evening, when vapors blurred the ancient arches.

“Depending on the weather, of course,” he twinkled. “And how much Merlot you’ve had at supper.”

Strangely, memory always seemed to guide Charles to a single boyhood afternoon. How was it, he wondered, that seventeen years had not diminished its brightness?

II

Nothing is as ancient as the forest, Charles. Except stones, of course. Not even time is as old as stones.

It was the last summer he would spend in the Ardennes before moving with his father to America. He’d been Charles de la Fontaine back then, a diffident, searching sixteen-year-old from Brussels, and the words had been those of his beloved uncle, Theodore de la Fontaine, professor of history at the lycée in Bouillon and local eccentric. Theodore had been wandering the Ardennesn and clambering about its medieval vestiges since his own boyhood and knew a thing or two about ancientness.

“Uncle, wait!”

They’d crossed the stone bridge and started up the ridge via a near-vertical path. Autumn had already tainted the summer with morning brume and cold rains. The footing was slick.

“Do you feel it, lad?” Theodore called over his shoulder. “The twelfth century, breathing on your neck?” His voice was uncharacteristically somber. They both knew this would be their last scramble up to the Blancheron ruins for a long time.

“Of course I feel it,” Charles muttered, lagging behind. He always felt the past on his neck in his uncle’s company.

“You’d better remember it, then,” Theodore said. “You won’t find anything like it in America.” The battered leather satchel he carried on forest expeditions swung out from his shoulder and narrowly missed his nephew.

Charles peered up the steep, wooded ridge: a perfect natural defense of rock and trunk. No wonder his ancestor had chosen the spot for his castle. Trees took root in fissures and grew with ghastly deformities, and the rocks themselves, raw sculptures of schist and shale, seemed to have been tossed about by a sullen spirit. Maugis, perhaps: the enchanter of Ardennes lore. The idea filled Charles with foreboding. Maugis was a shape-shifter; a ne’er-do-well. He could wrap himself in water…melt himself into mist. You never knew in what cave or pool he might be lurking.

Charles grasped a birch trunk and leaned out to watch the river glisten far below. Stephen de la Fontaine had probably scrabbled up the very same shale nine centuries ago, he thought. Then, with a frisson: Someone else might have, too.

About the Author

Author Leona Francombe

Leona Francombe is the author of The Heron Legacy, The Universe in 3/4 Time: A Novel of Old Europe (shortlisted for the 2023 Eric Hoffer Award), The Sage of Waterloo, Madame Ernestine und die Entdeckung der Liebe and many short stories and essays. Her discovery of an ancient ruin in a remote part of the Ardennes forest inspired The Heron Legacy. Leona is also a pianist and composer. She lives in Belgium.

Connect with Leona
Website | Goodreads