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 鈥� 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, 鈥榦ne of Ireland鈥檚 best writers, in a country with no shortage of them鈥� (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 91快色 Prize; 'Hawthorn & Child'; and 'Animals'. His first novel 'The Long Falling' was filmed by Martin Provost as 'O霉 Va La Nuit' in 2011. He has been awarded the Prix F茅mina 脡tranger and Premier Roman 脡tranger, the O Henry award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. 'Dooneen' is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions and by New Directions.
Judge Kate Briggs on Dooneen
"Keith Ridgway鈥檚 Dooneen invents its own narrative logic, starting with an exit. Mew steps through the bushes in London and out into an altered Dublin bright with panic, violence, protest, unlikely camaraderies and strange new animations. Mew鈥檚 letters to his lover Mootie, pleated with stories and songs, are vivid dispatches from a city under siege in all its weird chaos and frightening, detailed closeness. But sentence by exquisite, bewildered sentence, Dooneen is also a narrative of separation. 鈥業t is never only one person who feels anything is it, Mootie?鈥� Daring to write with sincerity, with sweetness, with a profound love for a person as well as the world and a future that has already foreclosed, Ridgway鈥檚 Dooneen is a rare experiment in tone. It couldn鈥檛 feel more generative, more novel, or more necessary."