This audaciously inventive novel does a masterful job of sustaining narrative momentum and suspense.

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?

Comparisons become ridiculous at the level where Ridgway is working, but I will just say that for me there is a sense-memory of Kafka’s The Castle and Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled in my experience of the intimate and dreamlike Dooneen. The feeling is that of seeing fiction’s power of implication stretched before your eyes.

Dooneen is surreal and unsettling, and will subvert your understanding of what time and reality – and even consciousness – is. It is also a poignant love story, and is Beckettian in its melancholy, wit and – most especially – its humanity. Keith Ridgway is a writer whose primary concern is the suffering of others, and his great skill is how quietly and subtly he evokes psychic pain

Keith Ridgway is an inimitable writer. He renders a world that is just like the one we're living in – only moreso. Never mind getting under your skin, Dooneen gets right down into your psyche and changes it. It emits a gas. One that wakes the reader up. It is his most uncanny and disquieting book, but also his most hopeful.'

Call it Ursula K. Le Guin’s speculative vision in the voice of Samuel Beckett amidst the Dublin housing crisis – or The Repossessed: An Ambiguous Dystopia. Listen to Mew, who has travelled back to Dublin for a book festival, writing back to London, to his partner Mootie, after communications have gone down due to an uprising by Irish housing and anti-government activists, in which Mew has accidentally and ambivalently found himself playing a dramatic part. A love letter from the end of the world – and to the difficult possibilities after old worlds end.