Excerpt from The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I think of the young fella, little Dylan, and how gorgeous he is, and how I always go about things the wrong way with Réaltín and accidentally look at her tits and she ends up pissed off with me and I always react like a right stones. I can't hold myself together at all, I gets pure wicked with her and tells her to fuck off and I can't tell her properly how I want things to be because I can't really think under pressure, when she's standing there, waiting for me to be a proper man. When I found out the other week that Bobby was above doing jobs for her I flipped the lid altogether; like, why couldn't she have asked me to do them jobs? But by then Bobby was after flipping his own lid and lamping his auld fella with a plank of wood across the poll. Instead of being reasonable and asking her what was the story, I charged up like a bull and started roaring out of me like a jackass and I frightened the young lad and her auld fella had to get thick with me and I took off over as far as Castlelough and sat on the low wall in front of the grass before the little pebble beach and looked out at the dark lake and thought about the bottomless hole that's meant to be out there in the middle of it.

Excerpted from The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan. Copyright © 2014 by Donal Ryan. Excerpted by permission of Steerforth Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.