BOOK REVIEW 

Reprinted from the February issue of RELATED☘️ magazine, for Brigid’s Library
and Irish by Ancestry members and friends 

THE SPINNING HEART, by Donal Ryan (US, Steerforth Press/ Doubleday Ireland) 

Donal Ryan’s multi-award-winning novel, THE SPINNING HEART, is one of those rare books that feels both incredibly small and impossibly vast. At just more than 150 pages, it could be read in an afternoon; yet the Ireland it captures—post‑Celtic Tiger, bewildered, wounded, and stubbornly hopeful—will sit with you long after you close the cover. For our readership, interested in “the real Ireland,” this is as unvarnished and authentic as contemporary Irish fiction gets.

Set in a small rural town in the aftermath of the crash, the novel is built around the collapse of a construction firm whose owner has done a runner, leaving workers unpaid, pensions raided, and a whole community hollowed out. That might sound like the premise for an economic tract, but Ryan’s approach is the opposite of abstract. He takes us into the minds of 21 different characters, each speaking in their own first-person monologue, each shaped and scarred by the boom and its brutal end.

You can read the rest HERE—

AUTHOR INTERVIEW

Reprinted from the February issue of RELATED☘️ magazine, for Brigid’s Library
and Irish by Ancestry members and friends 

BRIGID, by Kim Curran (Penguin Books/Michael Joseph) 

The idea of Brigid burns at the heart of Irish imagination. She is a goddess of fire and poetry, a saint of healing and hospitality, both honored by a day that shimmers with the promise of spring. For millennia, her name has meant light in the darkness, warmth in the cold, and inspiration in the silence.

Long before Christianity, Brigid was worshiped as a goddess of the Tuatha Dé Danann, patron of poets, smiths, and healers. Her realms tell us who she is: the forge’s flame, where rough metal is remade; the hearth’s flame, where community gathers and is fed; the inner flame of creativity, that sudden spark of words and ideas. In all of them, Brigid is transformation made visible. Nothing passes through her fire unchanged—not even Dublin-born author Kim Curran.

Curran had already written an acclaimed novel about the Morrigan, the war goddess, but writing Brigid felt even more intimidating. 

“(Brigid) was a great mirror for the Morrigan. I was really, really fascinated about the woman. We all grow up with her, she was the role model for us as young women,” Curran said in an interview. “We make Brigid crosses in school; she was held up as this perfect being, good and wonderful. Was I scared of the Morrigan? No, I was more scared of writing Brigid. How do you write something so perfect?”

You can read the rest HERE—