*VIRTUAL* Donal Ryan: The Queen of Dirt Island

March 11th, 2023

1:00pm PST

Register online here!

Bookshop West Portal is thrilled to host Donal Ryan for the release of The Queen of Dirt Island. Donal Ryan will be in conversation with beloved Dublin-born, local author of In the Event of Contact Ethel Rohan! We're grateful to Ethel Rohan for hosting this latest installment of our Irish Writer's Series.

This event is free to attend and will be held virtually on Crowdcast, as we are hosting Donal Ryan from Ireland.

You'll never truly understand love until you've read Donal Ryan: a searing, jubilant story about four generations of women and the fierce devotion that binds them together

The Aylward women of Nenagh, County Tipperary, Ireland, are mad about each other, but you wouldn’t always think it. You’d have to know them to know that—in spite of what the neighbors might say about raised voices and dramatic scenes—their house is a place of peace, filled with love, a refuge from the sadness and cruelty of the world.

Their story begins at an end and ends at a beginning. It involves wives and widows, gunrunners and gougers, sinners and saints. It’s a story of terrible betrayals and fierce loyalties, of isolation and togetherness, of transgression, forgiveness, desire, and love. Of all the things family can be and all the things it sometimes isn’t. The Queen of Dirt Island is an uplifting celebration of fierce, loyal love and the powerful stories that bind generations together.

~~~~~~~

DONAL RYAN is a novelist and short story-writer from Nenagh, Co. Tipperary. He has won several national and international awards for his fiction, and has twice been nominated for the Booker Prize. His work has been adapted for stage and screen and translated into over twenty languages. Donal is a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Limerick, where he lives with his wife Anne Marie and their two children. The Queen of Dirt Island is his seventh book and was an instant number one bestseller in Ireland.

ETHEL ROHAN is the author of In the Event of Contact, winner of the Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize (2021). Her debut novel The Weight of Him (St. Martin's Press and Atlantic Books, 2017) was an Amazon, Bustle, KOBO, and San Francisco Chronicle Best Book, and was shortlisted for the Reading Women Award. She is also the author of the story collections Goodnight Nobody and Cut Through the Bone, the former longlisted for the Edge Hill Prize and the latter longlisted for the Story Prize. Her work has appeared widely, including The New York Times, World Literature Today, The Washington Post, PEN America, Tin House, Guernica, and more. Raised in Ireland, she lives in San Francisco where she is a member of the Writers Grotto.