Dooneen

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. 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).

Praise for Dooneen:

‘‘His phrasing is memorable, his imagination extraordinary. He can be eerie, uncomfortable, hilarious, deranged and heartbreaking. (…) Dooneen, which is all those things, takes place in a world like ours – Mew and his boyfriend, Mootie, discuss Palestine, the rent and the increasingly hot weather – but, as the portal in the bushes suggests, it’s a variant that has taken a few different turns.(…) Dooneen steps outside consensus reality and goes deep into defamiliarisation to convey just how weird and chaotic life feels right now’

–The Observer

‘Ridgway's skill is to take the reader by the hand and slowly, solicitously, leave you upside down and inside out... What Dooneen leaves us with, after its eccentricities and unfathomables, is a simple understanding, as expressed by Philip Larkin—that what will survive us is love’ 

– The Times

‘The powerfully imagined world of Dooneen is a telling testimony not only to Ridgway's compulsive interest in the possibilities of creative prose but also to the capacity of great writing to bear witness to the corrosive cant of the entitled and the subversive decencies of the maligned’. 

—The Irish Times

‘Ridgway's scintillating and dreamlike latest teems with big ideas about the complex legacy of the Troubles in a country transformed by immigration and wealth... Mew wonders if he's dead or dreaming, but Ridgway never abandons his marvelous fantastical conceit. It's a bracing and singular state-of-the-nation novel’

 – Publishers Weekly

‘A surreal joy of a novel—a remarkable work. A stunning achievement, Ridgway's novel is urgent, profound, and shimmeringly beautiful’. 

—  Booklist (starred)

‘This audaciously inventive novel does a masterful job of sustaining narrative momentum and suspense’ 

— Kirkus 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

‘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