From a Low and Quiet Sea

Donal Ryan writes characters so well that as a reader you think ‘I’ve met that man’, or ‘I know that woman.’ But as a writer you simply wonder ‘how does he do it?’ From a Low and Quiet Sea is brutal and beautiful, carefully crafted portraits, deep and real, tied together, fashioned by a true artist. I absolutely loved it.

KIT DE WAAL

Donal Ryan writes with such sharp observation and humanity, that he makes us sit up and wonder at the tiny quiet internal lives of strangers. His writing is a wonderful gift to all of us. From a Low and Quiet Sea is another short and perfect novel to be inhaled in one heart-lurching gulp.

LIZ NUGENT

From a Low and Quiet Sea is beautifully written, compassionate and almost unbearably moving. I loved it. I would struggle to think of any other Irish author working today who writes with as much compassion as Donal Ryan.

LOUISE O'NEILL

An engrossing, unpredictable, beautifully crafted novel; Donal Ryan is giving us characters - their angles and their language - that we haven’t seen in Irish literature before.

RODDY DOYLE

It’s a beautiful, luminous kind of piece - full of mystery, compassion, woven with such skill; heartbreaking and restorative. I will carry these splintered men around with me for a long time, along with the women who have loved them.

RACHEL JOYCE

Ryan has the ability to shatter your heart into a million pieces with every book he writes - and even have you welcome the pain.

Stylist

As moving as anything written about Syria

Mail on Sunday

Deft and devastating…this book is both hard-hitting and uplifting: it serves as an indictment of the care industry, but also as a tribute to the way that humans care for one another.

The Observer

Bewitching…unforgettable...It takes a good writer to frame right and wrong within a coherent narrative and make it not feel like a finger-wagging sermon. It takes a great one, however, to make the contents heave and sigh before your eyes.’

Irish Independent

Devastating and masterful

Irish Country Magazine

An example of masterful storytelling

RTE Culture

A masterly portrait . . . the confidence with which Ryan dons the clothing of another culture marks a departure for his writing . . . a successor to John McGahern . . . It is exciting to see his subject matter move beyond his country’s borders, with the prospect of more of this to come.’

The Spectator

Ryan is not the first Irish writer indebted to Joyce, but his work reminds me of something Sylvia Beach said about Joyce: "He told me that he had never met a bore."…Wonderful

Irish Times

The denouement, which comes in breathless bursts, is devastating. From a Low and Quiet Sea leaves you with that sense of discombobulating enlightenment that so often characterises the quiet epiphanies of great short stories.

Sunday Times

With each novel Ryan gets better, and this moving and quietly insistent work is his best yet.

RTE Guide

Empathy shines through the work

Sunday Independent

You can sense his compassion in the bones of his work

Sunday Business Post

A hugely affecting, moving read. I was heartbroken by the end, but adored every chapter

Image Magazine

Beautiful

Woman’s Way

It is vomit-inducing, it’s so good.

Kit de Waal, Observer

Donal Ryan has not only bounded over a wall into new territory, but built himself a castle there . . . This is a superb novel.

JOHN BOYNE

From a Low and Quiet Sea is not only very cleverly constructed, but deeply moving too. I loved it.

Louis de Bernières

The lives and stories, loves and tragedies, animating From a Low and Quiet Sea are wonderfully individual and finely alive. This is a brief book: yet one that lingers long in the reader’s mind.

New Statesman

Themes of kindness and humanity are the binding thread…and Ryan writes of them with characteristic warmth and insight.

Sunday Times

I struggle to think of a writer who has been so prolific and consistent in quality as Ryan . . . Brutally honest, moving and often hilarious

Guardian

Each section displays Ryan’s range as a writer... [he] writes with brilliant empathy.

Boston Globe

Exquisitely rendered, with raw anguish sublimated into lyrical prose.

Washington Post

A thing of such beauty and compassion, a reminder of what the very finest sentences can do to shatter and then reassemble our hearts

Kamila Shamsie

Beautiful and affecting

David Nicholls

The book has stayed with me

Jonathan Franzen, Guardian, Best Books of 2018

Heartbreaking … Arguably the best of the new wave of Irish writers to have emerged over the last decade

Irish Mail on the Sunday, Books of the Year

Ryan has the gift of ventriloquism - he inhabits his fictional creations thoroughly, enveloping you in their worlds

Sunday Business Post, Books of the Year

Sublime

Irish Independent, Books of the Year

Haunting ... utterly persuasive

Joseph O'Connor, Irish Times, Books of the Year

From a Low and Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan made me laugh and cry and forced me to look strangers in the eye

Liz Nugent, Irish Times, Books of the Year

Beautifully bleak and characterised by his remarkable ability to write about grief and common humanities.

Diarmaid Ferriter, Irish Times, Books of the Year

Beautiful, compassionate

Sinéad Crowley, RTÉ Culture, Best Books of 2018

Superlatives wouldn’t do for describing From a Low and Quiet Sea … understated, and gloriously heart rendering

Hot Press, Books of the Year