Dublin through-and-through but universal, timeless yet punctual to the world right now. Ridgway’s uniquely questioning, epigrammatic voice picks out the personal, the political, the absurd, the deeply serious, strobing away at how to read, how to write, the dangers of narrative and other oppressions, how to find meaning and how to resist, how to live. In this mysterious, miraculous novel Ridgway’s prose has the unarguable lucidity of genius.

Dooneen is an engrossing queer-in-all-ways thriller, an insurgent near-future haunting of our present, a vivid reimagining of Dublin, and a love and loss story.

Ridgway has written a near perfect dream – a rebellion against reality, against space and form – but the blood is real, the panic, the love and friendship are there in front of you, can almost be touched. They don’t like you to say “masterpiece” in the endorsements, but read it, and tell me, what else can you call it?