Heart, Be at Peace
by Donal Ryan
🏆 Winner of the 2025 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction
Twenty-one voices from a small town in Ireland come together to paint a picture of a community in all its complexity: after the economic crisis, there are dark undercurrents of criminality moving through to fill the gaps left by a lack of jobs and hope. But there is also tenderness and beauty. All of life is here, and the way ordinary lives are shaped by forces outside of their control is powerfully evoked.
Recommendations from our site
“We have an outstanding shortlist of eight political novels for this year’s Orwell Prize for Fiction. All of them are winners. But the single work that has finally emerged as our overall champion is Donal Ryan’s Heart, Be at Peace. For its clarity. For its twenty-one perfectly pitched voices. For the neatness and breadth of its form. For its humanity and kindness. Here is a small deprived community in rural Ireland – after the Good Friday Peace Accord and the collapse of the Celtic Tiger – suffering and recovering from the bruises of its political and economic past. The boom years – in both senses of that word, might be over – but, in Donal Ryan’s exceptional Heart, Be At Peace, the echoes still reverberate and hum—Jim Crace, chair of the judging panel” Read more...
The Best Political Novels of 2025: The Orwell Prize for Fiction
