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 – 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, ‘one of Ireland’s best writers, in a country with no shortage of them’ (The Times).
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 Goldsmith’s Prize; Hawthorn & Child; and Animals. His first novel The Long Falling was filmed by Martin Provost as Où Va La Nuit in 2011. He has been awarded the Prix Fémina Étranger and Premier Roman Étranger, the O Henry award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Dooneen is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions and by New Directions.
‘Ridgway has written a near perfect dream – a rebellion against reality, against space and form – but the blood is real, the panic, the love and friendship are there in front of you, can almost be touched. They don’t like you to say “masterpiece” in the endorsements, but read it, and tell me, what else can you call it?’— Ben Pester, author of The Expansion Project