Idiosyncratic and fascinating.
Keith Ridgway is a Dubliner living in London. His previous novels include A Shock (winner of the 2022 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction), Hawthorn & Child, and Animals. He has been awarded the Prix Fémina Étranger and Premier Roman Étranger, the O Henry award, and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.
Finally, Ridgway gives us A Shock, his thrilling and unsparing, slippery and shockingly good new novel.
Formed as a rondel of interlocking stories with a clutch of more or less loosely connected repeating characters, it’s at once deracinated yet potent with place, druggy yet frighteningly shot through with reality. His people appear, disappear, and reappear. They’re on the fringes of London, clinging to sanity or solvency or a story by their fingernails, consumed by emotions and anxieties in fuzzily understood situations. A deft, high-wire act, full of imprecise yet sharp dialog as well as witchy sleights of hand reminiscent of Muriel Spark, A Shock delivers a knockout punch of an ending.
Perhaps Ridgway’s most breathtaking quality is his scintillating stealthiness: you can never quite put your finger on how he casts his spell—he delivers the shock of a master jewel thief (already far-off and scot-free) stealing your watch: when at some point you look down at your wrist, all you see is that in more than one way you don’t know what time it is …
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Never Love a Gambler is a showcase for the exceptional talents of Keith Ridgway. The Times (London) praised his stories as “flawlessly structured yarns told in lovingly crafted prose.” Ridgway’s characters negotiate their way through love, madness, lust, anger, religious obsession, crime, and absence in stories told with innovative mastery and brightened by fiercely vivid dialogues. Never Love a Gambler is a mental rust-remover: refreshing, bracing, and often violently funny.
Hawthorn & Child are mid-ranking detectives tasked with finding significance in the scattered facts. They appear and disappear in the fragments of this book along with a ghost car, a crime boss, a pick-pocket, a dead racing driver and a pack of wolves. The mysteries are everywhere, but the biggest of all is our mysterious compulsion to solve them.
Read an excerpt of Hawthorn & Child published by Granta Books.
Idiosyncratic and fascinating.
Vibrant, wonderfully written, funny, and deeply troubled. The writing is effortlessly lyrical, venturing into extraordinary, at times beautiful interludes of philosophical observation. Read Hawthorn & Child. Better still read it twice: it’s that real, that good, that true.
A hundred times worth reading.
Brilliantly well done–alive, funny, and deeply troubled.
Beckett-like emptiness that gnaws at the conscience … Ridgway has clearly arrived to trouble our sleep with wit and violence.
Ridgway’s book is successfully thought-provoking and haunting.
This is a mystery novel unlike any you’ve ever read. Its strangeness is reminiscent of Beckett’s work, and Ridgway is a masterful storyteller.
