Strange Flowers

By: Donal Ryan

Narrated by: Donna Anita Nikolaisen

In 1973, twenty-year-old Moll Gladney takes a morning bus from her rural home and disappears.

Bewildered and distraught, Paddy and Kit must confront an unbearable prospect: that they will never see their daughter again.

Five years later, Moll returns. What - and who - she brings with her will change the course of her family’s life forever.

Beautiful and devastating, this exploration of loss, alienation and the redemptive power of love reaffirms Donal Ryan as one of the most talented and empathetic writers at work today.


'Endlessly surprising and incredibly moving' David Nicholls

'With each new novel Donal Ryan's ink seems to sink deeper into the page. In Strange Flowers he gathers together the fragments of broken lives and makes us something new and beautiful from them' Rónán Hession, author of Leonard and Hungry Paul

'Exquisite … you will love the quiet world of Paddy & Kit Gladney and all it is their daughter Moll brings to their door. Beautiful' Anne Griffin, author of When All Is Said

Critic reviews

Here is love as a weapon and a balm. Love as faith, fate and redemption ... a gorgeously wrought book - compassionate without dissolving into nostalgia

Endlessly surprising and incredibly moving

A triumph ... Ryan slowly and beautifully reveals the way that even broken people can open the door fully to the truth of themselves

His moving story of love and loss deserves to win a host of awards. It's an outstanding read

I think you have to truly love people to write like this

A triumph of quiet but devastating power, by some distance the best novel I've read so far this year (Joseph O'Connor)

A big-hearted, beautiful work of art, full of truth and intensity

Classic Ryan; poignant and atmospheric storytelling ... quiet but intermittently explosive

I knew Donal Ryan's latest would be good and I was right - it's a risky act of imagination that works, and the sentences are as beautiful as ever (Sarah Moss)

The lyricism of Ryan's prose, laced with compassion, is astonishing (Best Irish Novels of the Year)

Strange Flowers

A beautiful book written with such emotion and love of the land and nature .
Lots of twists and turns, beautifully crafted and intertwined story of love and forbidden love and squinting windows of rural Ireland , and yet a feel of community, of watching out for each other, enduring love.
The words,images dance on the pages, completely immersing one in this beautiful land of a small village in Tipperary