Donal Ryan, from Nenagh, Co. Tipperary,is the author of five number one-bestselling novels and a short story collection.He has won several awards for his fiction, including the European Union Prize for Literature,the Guardian First Book Award and four Irish Book Awards, and has been shortlisted for several more, including the Costa Book Awardand the Dublin International Literary Award. He was nominated for the Booker Prize in 2013 for his debut novel, The Spinning Heart, and again in 2018, for his fourth novel,From A Low and Quiet Sea. In 2021 he became the first Irish writer to be awarded the Jean Monnet Prize for European Literature. His work has been adapted for stage and screen and translated into over twenty languages. A law graduate and former civil servant, Donal has lectured in Creative Writing at the University of Limerick since 2014 and lives in Castletroy with his wife Anne Marie and their two children.
"So fine is this novel, and so purely told, that it establishes Mr.
Ryan as the heir apparent to the late, great Irish stylists John
McGahern and William Trevor… There are countless passages… that are
so sculpted and beautiful that one’s lips begin to shape their
words unbidden, the way a song can move a crowd to its
rhythm."—Wall Street Journal
"A dwarf star of a novel: small, dark, impressively
dense... All We Shall Know makes a novel about the heaviness
of existence into something that is even, and easy — and, at times,
perfect, and right."—Boston Globe
"[A] haunting, beautifully written story.”—Cleveland Plain
Dealer
“An extraordinary portrait of adultery, loneliness and betrayal . .
. One of the finest writers working in Ireland today . . .in the
great tradition of tragic fiction, his lonely adulteress coming to
grief in the same shadowy spaces as Emma Bovary or Anna
Karenina.”—John Burnside, Guardian
“[All We Shall Know] is a novel of self-sacrifice, penance, and
circumscribed possibilities for happiness, narrated with great
compassion and written with elegant lyricism. . . Emotionally
intense, deeply engaging, and profound.”—Kirkus
“A lush and lively novel that fascinates from its opening words to
its tender last lines.”—Publishers Weekly
"Rich in the cadence of both the rural Irish vernacular and the
Traveller mash-up of English and the Cant. [All We Shall Know]
captures the turbulence of marriage, love, sex, class and
violence--while leaving room for the big Irish heart that lies
behind so much great literature in English."—Shelf Awareness
“A joy to read, for all that it breaks your heart . . . builds on
[Ryan’s] reputation for cramming generations of grief and
disappointment into less than 200 pages of beautiful prose. . . .
He has also created two female character – cussed and brave,
vulnerable and cruel – who come together to repair the past and
stitch together a possible future.”—Katy Guest, Independent
“Ryan’s language is poetic, powerful and heart-rending – this short
novel has a beautiful economy and control.”—The Times (UK)
"Stunning." —The Bookseller (London)
“All We Shall Know is a new and ambitious departure . . . exerts a
powerful grip. . . . the novel, written at white heat in sentences
that sometimes flow for a full paragraph, reads compulsively and is
delivered with an impressively disciplined power. Ryan’s rise to
prominence may have been meteoric and his output dizzyingly
prolific, but he is a writer who is very far from being a flash in
the pan.”—Roy Foster, The Irish Times
“A consummate artist . . . The denouement offers a satisfying
element of redemption . . . a great writer whose steady maturation
proceeds apace.”—The Sunday Times
“Raw, radiant prose . . . [a] wonderful novel.”—Sunday Express
“ [A] gem of a novel. With a sure sense of place, and a convincing
portrayal of life lived at the edgy margins, it vividly plots the
landscape of the heart en route to a gripping and ultimately
redemptive finale.”—Daily Mail
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