Book review: This Is The Ritual

IRISH writer Rob Doyle pulls no punches with his writing style. The awardwinning author of Here Are The Young Men, Doyle singles out various topics for this collection of short stories.

Rob Doyle

Bloomsbury, €21.75;

ebook, €13.75

Each one deals with the less-than- appealing aspects of people’s lives, which makes their tales all the more interesting. Ireland and the Irish form a large part of Doyle’s subject matter, a clear case of the writer writing about what he knows best.

From the pronounced profanities of John-Paul Finnegan, who is introduced on a ferry trip to Ireland, Doyle skips to the disparate lives of Ireland’s vanished literary outlaw Killian Turner, a woman taking part in a sleep experiment while escaping a relationship, a depressed young man encountering a tramp on a Dublin industrial estate and a man’s fixation with his girlfriend’s red shoes.

Sketching out the lives of his various subjects across a plethora of European cities, Doyle saves his grittiest prose and most unflinching descriptions for Ireland.