Books: “The Queen of Dirt Island” by Donal Ryan

If you enjoyed last year’s film “The Banshees of Inisherin,” you’ll feel the same way about Donal Ryan’s “Queen of Dirt Island.” This luminous short novel covers similar territory: a small Irish village in the 1980s where family is everything and the outside world means next to nothing.

Our protagonist Saoirse (“If she ever goes to America,” her mother Eileen says, “the Yanks won’t have a clue how to pronounce it”) is born the same day her father dies in a car accident. This leaves Eileen and her crabby paternal grandmother Mary to raise her, two women who fight like cats and dogs but who basically can’t live without each other—or the proverbial pot of tea on the stove.

As a young girl, Saorise seems to have a native intellectual curiosity, but this is stifled when she becomes pregnant by a minor rock star and gives birth to a baby girl Pearl. This now becomes a story about four generations of women, in which men are either a disappointment (Mary’s sons are simpletons or in prison) or an afterthought.

When Eileen’s estranged father dies, a battle begins for the inheritance of Dirt Island – a narrow strip of land adjacent to Eileen’s childhood home. Saoirse and her mother must fight for Dirt Island, but also against the patriarchy surrounding it, including Eileen’s brother who nearly strangles his sister for a piece of the land.

“Queen of Dirt Island” reads very much like the family’s life itself: quiet, uneventful but just interesting and witty enough to keep you engaged. If you aren’t Irish, after reading this novel you’ll wish you were. A definite thumbs up.