Bartholomew Port, known to all as Mew, steps into the bushes in a London park and steps out of the bushes in a Dublin one. Not only that - there are no cars; there are moving footpaths; there is no church; everything seems quite queer. Mew has arrived in a Dublin that is alive with song, with rumour, with ghosts, and with an unmistakable sense of insurgency. In this suspiciously timeless city that breathes an old revolutionary air, Mew fiercely misses his beloved Mootie, back home in London. An unravelling, an impossibility, a gathering of voices and a single dream, Dooneen is the layered, allusive and wildly original new novel from Keith Ridgway, 'one of Ireland's best writers, in a country with no shortage of them' (The Times).

About the Author

Keith Ridgway is a Dubliner living in London. His novels include A Shock, which won the 2021 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Goldsmith's Prize; Hawthorn & Child; and Animals. His first novel The Long Falling was filmed by Martin Provost as Ou Va La Nuit in 2011. He has been awarded the Prix Femina Etranger and Premier Roman Etranger, the O Henry award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Dooneen is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions and by New Directions.

Reviews

'Ridgway has written a near perfect dream - a rebellion against reality, against space and form - but the blood is real, the panic, the love and friendship are there in front of you, can almost be touched. They don't like you to say "masterpiece" in the endorsements, but read it, and tell me, what else can you call it?'
- Ben Pester, author of The Expansion Project

'Dublin through-and-through but universal, timeless yet punctual to the world right now. Ridgway's uniquely questioning, epigrammatic voice picks out the personal, the political, the absurd, the deeply serious, strobing away at how to read, how to write, the dangers of narrative and other oppressions, how to find meaning and how to resist, how to live. In this mysterious, miraculous novel Ridgway's prose has the unarguable lucidity of genius.'
- Richard Beard, author of Sad Little Men

'Dooneen is surreal and unsettling, and will subvert your understanding of what time and reality - and even consciousness - is. It is also a poignant love story, and is Beckettian in its melancholy, wit and - most especially - its humanity. Keith Ridgway is a writer whose primary concern is the suffering of others, and his great skill is how quietly and subtly he evokes psychic pain.'
- Mary Costello, author of A Beautiful Loan

'Comparisons become ridiculous at the level where Ridgway is working, but I will just say that for me there is a sense-memory of Kafka's The Castle and Ishiguro's The Unconsoled in my experience of the intimate and dreamlike Dooneen. The feeling is that of seeing fiction's power of implication stretched before your eyes.'
- Jonathan Lethem, author of Brooklyn Crime Novel

'Call it Ursula K. Le Guin's speculative vision in the voice of Samuel Beckett amidst the Dublin housing crisis - or The Repossessed: An Ambiguous Dystopia. A love letter from the end of the world - and to the difficult possibilities after old worlds end.'
- So Mayer, author of Bad Language

'A hugely accomplished, politically acute, and strangely, intensely touching novel. Ridgway shows us - again - how it's done.'
- Isabel Waidner, author of As If

'A strangely transporting fever-dream of a novel.'
- Simon Okotie, author of After Absalon

'Dooneen is an engrossing queer-in-all-ways thriller, an insurgent near-future haunting of our present, a vivid reimagining of Dublin, and a love and loss story.'
- David Hayden, author of Darker with the Lights On

'A Shock is formally dazzling, stylistically plural and impeccable, and pulsating with meaning. In an overcrowded field that often feels like looking into a full box of matches, it's like opening one such and discovering a diamond inside. Make no mistake, Ridgway's the Real Thing.'
- Neel Mukherjee (praise for A Shock)

'At first it seems we might be in a book of interlinked stories, but discovering you aren't quite where you thought you might be is part of the deliberate disorientation of A Shock. It soon becomes clear that the sections in the novel don't interlink so much as echo and rhyme. The observation is acute, the dialogue sparkles, the movement between interiority and surveillance is deft. It is a novel of in-between places that keeps the reader off-balance to surprising, intelligent and sometimes eerie effect.'
- Kamila Shamsie, citation for the 2021 Goldsmiths Prize shortlist (praise for A Shock)

'A hundred times worth reading.'
- Penelope Fitzgerald (praise for Keith Ridgway)

'Idiosyncratic and fascinating.'
- Zadie Smith (praise for Keith Ridgway)

'Remarkable.'
- Colm Toibin (praise for Keith Ridgway)

'Breathtakingly unpredictable and unapologetically strange. And the writing is perfectly assured and elegant.'
- Ian Rankin (praise for Keith Ridgway)

'Keith Ridgway's gifts as a writer are many: his complex, vivid characters, his ability to create a humane and tender cityscape in an unfeeling metropolis, and to dig into our fallibilities and desires with such humour and compassion.'
- Sinead Gleeson (praise for Keith Ridgway)

'Keith Ridgway is one of Ireland's best writers, from a country with no shortage of them. His writing is sensitive and original.... Ridgway's trick - no, his skill - is that the stories combine down-to-earth realism with an incremental sense of strangeness. He seduces you, then smacks you over the head, abandoning you miles from where you thought you'd be.'
- John Self, Times (praise for Keith Ridgway)

'Endlessly interesting.'
- Anthony Cummins, Observer (praise for Keith Ridgway)

Book Information
ISBN 9781804272459
Author Keith Ridgway
Format Paperback
Page Count 328
Imprint Fitzcarraldo Editions
Publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions