The Queen of Dirt Island  follows four generations of the Aylward women as they negotiate grief and conflict. On the surface it’s a family saga set in one small corner of Ireland but underneath is a tale that speaks to the universal themes of love and friendship.

Donal Ryan’s seventh novel begins with tragedy and loss. On the day Eileen Aylward gives birth to her first child Saoirse , her husband is killed in a road accident. That loss ripples outward through everything that follows.

Ostracised by her community and family (who consider her a whore because she’d had the child only five months after marriage), Eileen comes to rely heavily on her mother-in- law Mary.

They bicker, clash and trade insults almost every day but they still gather around the kitchen table to share gossip while they smoke and drink tea. As the years pass the bond between the two older women grows and deepens, united by their love for Saoirse and in due course, for her own daughter Pearl.

They had a way of being around one another that was based on each having a natural grasp of the other’s particularities and peccadilloes; they nursed each other’s wounds without every seem seeming to do so, they fed one another’s spirits, and an outsider looking in, listening to the seeming rancour of their discourse, hearing the names the younger woman would call the older woman, the way she’d threaten almost daily to strangle her, to suffocate her, to drown her, to shoot her, to take her to the ***** vet, could not be blamed for supposing them to be mortal enemies, and for worrying that the older woman’s welfare was in danger, that her very life was under constant threat.

Together these women face off the community’s hostility and weather storm after storm: Mary’s son Purdie is jailed for his involvement with the IRA; the wife of her other son commits suicide and Saoirse is betrayed by a boyfriend.

Then Eileen’s inheritance of Dirt Island — a strip of land near her childhood home — is threatened. This bit of land might be just <em>“a bit of soggy fucking grass and a dirty pond”</em>, but it belongs to Eileen, not her bullying brother. So once again, the Aylwards go into battle. After years of standing up for themselves in a largely patriarchal world, it’s a relief when the novel ends on a glimmer of hope for the future.

One of the first things you notice about Donal Ryan’s writing is the rhythm of it. His sentences have a musicality that feels rooted in Irish speech — they roll and accumulate, building emotion almost without you realising it. There’s no showiness here, no reaching for effect. The prose is precise and uncluttered, but somehow every line carries weight.

The Queen of Dirt Island is now the fourth novel I’ve read by Donal Ryan and it’s become my favourite. Just like the others, this book has a fragmented structure. The story is told in more than a hundred short, vignette-style chapters — some just a page or two long — each one a snapshot of a moment in the Aylward women’s lives.

I’ll admit I wasn’t sure about this approach at first but Ryan creates such a strong sense of his people and their world, that I was compelled to keep reading … and reading. Each fragment builds upon the others to create a novel that is bigger than its individual parts. It’s simply glorious.