Donal Ryan's 'Where Are the Kings' Draws Praise from The Guardian as a Novel of Grief, Time and Family
The Guardian has published a review of Irish author Donal Ryan's new novel Where Are the Kings, describing it as a "timeless tale of family sorrows and joys" that explores how loss distorts the ordinary passage of hours — what the reviewer calls "grief-time" (The Guardian).
Ryan, who is from Nenagh, County Tipperary, has published seven number one bestselling novels in Ireland along with a short story collection, according to his publisher's author page (Penguin). His debut, The Spinning Heart, was followed by a sequel, Heart, Be at Peace, which The Guardian reviewed in July 2024. The Queen of Dirt Island, listed as his seventh book, was an instant number one bestseller in Ireland (Penguin Random House).
Where Are the Kings centres on Jack, a 12-year-old boy raised by his mother's family — grandparents, uncles and an aunt — after his mother drowns and his father, Tomáš, is institutionalised. Jack's defining memory is of pursuing his mother to the lake in her rusty Fiat, arriving too late. His uncles, Theo and Haulie, are mechanics given to retelling the great myths, lending the novel a questing, existential undertone. The book also encompasses incestuous desire, a dead deer, contested ashes, feckless priests and a flatulent roommate — a sweep of incident that The Guardian's reviewer found cohesive rather than sprawling.
Penguin Random House lists the hardcover at US$28.00 and describes it as "a funny, tender novel about a young boy who comes of age amid the fallout from his mother's death" (Penguin Random House).
The Guardian review opened by situating Ryan's novel within a wave of recent fiction engaging with time travel or temporal themes, naming Chloe Benjamin's The Understory, Jaclyn Moriarty's Time Travel for Beginners, Solvej Balle's On the Calculation of Volume, Toshikazu Kawaguchi's Before the Coffee Gets Cold and Kaliane Bradley's The Ministry of Time. Ryan's contribution, the reviewer noted, approaches time not as science-fiction machinery but as the elastic, unreliable thing grief makes of it.
The review also drew a favourable comparison to Paul Murray's novel The Bee Sting, which was shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize — a reference point that signals where Ryan's latest sits in the landscape of contemporary Irish literary fiction.
What makes Where Are the Kings stand out in Ryan's body of work is its refusal of a single register. The grief at its core is real — a child chasing a mother he cannot save — but the novel folds in myth, comedy and the texture of a working community without flattening any of them. For readers coming to Ryan for the first time, it is a gateway shaped by loss but not consumed by it.
