Slanting of the Sun: Stories

An old man looks into the eyes of a burglar left to guard him while his brother is beaten; an Irish priest in a war-torn Syrian town teaches its men the art of hurling; a squad of broken friends assemble to take revenge on a rapist; a young man sets off on his morning run, reflecting on the ruins of his relationship, but all is not as it seems.
Eagerly anticipated first collection of short stories from the author of The Spinning Heart and The Thing About December.     Donal Ryan's short stories pick up where his acclaimed novels The Spinning Heart andThe Thing About December left off, dealing with the human cost of loneliness, isolation and displacement. Sometimes this is present in the ordinary, the mundane; sometimes it is triggered by a fatal encounter or a tragic decision. At the heart of these stories, crucially, is how people are drawn to each other and cling on to love, often in desperate circumstances. In a number of the stories, these emotional bonds are forged by traumatic events caused by one of the characters -- between an old man and the frightened young burglar left to guard him which his brother is beaten; between another young man and the mother of a girl whose death he caused when he crashed his car; between a lonely middle-aged shopkeeper and her assistant. Displacement pervades stories involving emigration (an Irish priest in war-torn Syria) or immigration (an African refugee in Ireland). Some of the stories are set in the same small town in rural Ireland as the novels, with names that will be familiar to Donal's readers. In haunting prose, Donal Ryan has captured the brutal beauty of the human heart in all its hopes and failings.