Donal Ryan's Where Are the Kings: grief-time in Tipperary — SkimNews
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- Donal Ryan publishes "Where Are the Kings," his eighth novel, centred on 12-year-old Jack whose mother has drowned and whose father Tomáš has been institutionalised.
- The novel is set in an indeterminate corner of Tipperary — "late 1990s, but that date feels almost incidental"; the reviewer says it could as easily be the 1980s or even the 1950s.
- Ryan structures the book with Latin memento mori section headings — "Tempus Edax," "Tempus Fugit," "Tempus Imperator" — anchoring a meditation on how grief distorts ordinary time.
- Jack is raised by his mother's family — stoic grandparents, mechanics-uncles Theo and Haulie, an aunt — whose "affable chatter" the reviewer calls the novel's chief comic pleasure.
- The novel continues Ryan's fictional village of Knockagowny from his 2020 book "Strange Flowers," extending what the reviewer calls his mapping of "an imagined Ireland, family by family."
- The reviewer situates the novel within a wider trend of time-bending literary fiction — citing Benjamin, Moriarty, Niffenegger, Balle, Kawaguchi and Bradley — but argues Ryan's contribution is grief rather than speculative conceit.
Why it matters: For readers of contemporary Irish fiction, Ryan's eighth novel extends the unhurried, pastoral mode of "Strange Flowers" into an explicit meditation on time itself, with memento mori section headings framing a story the reviewer calls "a gentle novel of ungentle things." By blending family farce (incestuous lust, a dead deer, contested ashes) with the unresolvable grief of a 12-year-old, Ryan deliberately turns away from "cathartic trauma plotting."
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