What readers think of The Spinning Heart, plus links to write your own review.

This is a short but powerful novel—so powerful that I had to occasionally stop reading and just breathe. It's a story about real life in rural Ireland around 2010 when the economy collapsed in a severe recession. Jobs were hard to come by, making money tight and lives compromised. As the novel progresses, it gets darker and more disturbing, reflecting the way people feel when they lose control of their lives. What could once be contained now erupts in violence, but there is also much humor, love, and tenderness.

Masterfully written by Donal Ryan, the novel, which was a finalist in 2013 for the prestigious Booker Prize, is structured as 21 interconnected vignettes with each one focused on a single person with a unique story to tell. These individual stories create a unified tragic story of a community that is fractured and bleeding, a community that is falling apart and unable to support its citizens. The brilliance of the writing is in each character's voice—the different use of language, style, and vernacular.

It begins with Bobby Mahon, a construction foreman known for his hot wife, Triona, and his absolute sense of ethics and honesty. Bobby figures in each of the other stories, making him the common thread throughout.

You'll meet Pokey, the manager of a construction company who cheats everyone—his workers and homebuyers. You'll meet Josie, Pokey's father, who is mortified by his son's actions. Réaltín is young, single, and beautiful and the mother of a 4-year-old Dylan. They live in one of the not-quite-finished homes that Pokey built, and she uses her sexual charms to get what she wants. Trevor is troubled…and frightening in his latest desires to do harm. Kate runs a daycare center and is barely holding it together after the Dell plant closed, leaving so many unemployed. There is also Bobby's father, Frank, who tells his story from the grave.

This is a novel without a plot, but the characters are so real, so authentic that they carry the book from the first page to the last. Each has a heart, a spinning heart, and we are privileged to know them.

While this is dark and somewhat dispiriting, there is hope and transcendence in the end.