Donal Ryan's 'Where Are the Kings': Grief-Time Family Portrait
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- Donal Ryan's eighth novel, Where Are the Kings, centers on 12-year-old Jack, whose mother has drowned and whose father Tomáš has been institutionalised, leaving him in the care of his mother's extended family in rural Tipperary.
- The novel blends grief with comic family life — uncles Theo and Haulie hold philosophical garage conversations, nana delivers "blasphemous wisdom" on Adam being "the world's first disappointing husband," and the plot involves incestuous lust, a dead deer and contested ashes.
- Ryan structures the book around Latin time epithets — Tempus Edax, Tempus Fugit, Tempus Imperator — as memento mori reminders, with the reviewer describing the work as a study in "grief-time" where "days stretch, collapse, repeat and disappear."
- The setting is deliberately temporally ambiguous — the late 1990s feels almost incidental, and the timeline could pass for the 1980s or even the 1950s, with Theo and Haulie's garage described as a "wormhole" where time "susurrates and syncopates."
- The novel shares the unhurried world of Ryan's 2020 book Strange Flowers, set in the fictional village of Knockagowny, with the reviewer suggesting Ryan is "mapping an imagined Ireland, family by family" like Niall Williams.
- The reviewer frames Ryan not as a "grand vaudevillian" or "cathartic trauma plotter" but as a writer of "gentle novels of ungentle things," whose moral heartbeat is that "things don't stop being beautiful because ugly things happen."
Why it matters: Ryan's eighth novel and his *Strange Flowers* lineage suggest he is building a sustained fictional Ireland around Knockagowny, with *Where Are the Kings* arriving as a quieter, comic-tinged alternative to the cathartic trauma narratives (like Paul Murray's *The Bee Sting*) the premise could have become.
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