
Heart, Be at Peace
A Novel
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By:
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Donal Ryan
About this listen
Winner of the Irish Book of the Year * Shortlisted for the Nero Novel of the Year * A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice
From one of the most acclaimed Irish writers today, a new novel about smalltown Ireland that explores a community on the mend and the power of love and trauma to both bring people together and divide them
“I said it before. Madness comes circling around. Ten-year cycles, as true as the sun will rise. . .”
In a small town in Ireland, the local people have weathered the storm of economic collapse and now look to the future: The jobs are back, the dramas of the past seemingly lulled, and although the town bears the scars of its history, new stories have begun to unfold.
But an insidious menace now creeps through back-alley shadows and into the lives of the townspeople. Old grudges fester and new ones arise. Young people are lured by the promise of fast money while the generation above them tries to hold back the tide of an enemy beyond their control. And the peace of this town is about to be shattered in an unimaginable way.
A stunning, lyrical novel told in twenty-one voices, Heart, Be at Peace reveals a community that together looks to overcome the betrayals, secrets, and grudges that can divide families, neighbors, and entire generations.
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Critic reviews
An Post Irish Book of the Year
“Ryan’s sentences gleam, peeling the calloused skin of machismo to expose the vulnerabilities of his men, cutting against our expectations. . .Heart, Be at Peace moves with the lightness and felicity of a story collection, sifting relationships built on sand, pummeled by tides of human folly.”―New York Times Book Review
“[T]he structure of Heart, Be at Peace is exactly what makes it compelling. The tension and slow unraveling of the mystery at the heart of this chronicle of small-town and small-city Ireland today, fraught with problems created by drug dealers and scam artists, is brought to brilliant life through the intertwining of voices and the individual stories of protagonists and antagonists, heroes and villains, characters both peripheral and intrinsic.”―New York Journal of Books
“Spellbinding. . .a gripping story that is heartbreaking, funny and occasionally raunchy of a beaten-down but resilient community that embodies the best and worst of humanity.”―Associated Press
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Overall
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Ireland 1973, a baby boy is found on the beach of a close-knit fishing village. Fisherman Ambrose Bonnar offers to bring the child into his own family: his son, Declan, wife, Christine, and up the lane, Christine's sister and aging father. The townspeople remain fascinated by the baby, now named Brendan, as he grows into a strange yet charismatic young man.
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A Rrespite
- By Penny Reeder on 05-31-25
By: Garrett Carr
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Ripeness
- A Novel
- By: Sarah Moss
- Narrated by: Flora Montgomery
- Length: 9 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Edith, just out of school, has been sent from her quiet English life to rural Italy. It is the 1960s, and her mother has issued strict instructions: tend to her sister, ballet dancer Lydia, in the final weeks of her scandalous pregnancy; help at the birth; make a phone call that will summon the nuns who will spirit the child away to a new home. Decades later, happily divorced, recently moved, and full of new energy, Edith has made a life of contentment and comfort in Ireland. Then her best friend Maebh receives a shocking phone call from an American man.
By: Sarah Moss
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A Slanting of the Sun
- Stories
- By: Donal Ryan
- Narrated by: Wayne Farrell
- Length: 5 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Donal Ryan's short stories pick up where his acclaimed novels The Spinning Heart and The Thing About December left off, dealing with dramas set in motion by loneliness and displacement and revealing stories of passion and desire where less astute observers might fail to detect the humanity that roils beneath the surface. Sometimes these dramas are found in ordinary, mundane situations; sometimes they are triggered by a fateful encounter or a tragic decision. At the heart of these stories, crucially, is how people are drawn to each other and cling to love when and where it can be found.
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Tales of everyday people.
- By Edie's reads on 01-21-19
By: Donal Ryan
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Strange Flowers
- A Novel
- By: Donal Ryan
- Narrated by: Donna Nikolaisen
- Length: 5 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1973, 20-year-old Moll Gladney takes a morning bus from her rural home in Ireland 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 from London. What - and who - she brings with her will change the course of her family's life forever.
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Beautiful story and narration
- By Stevi on 04-05-23
By: Donal Ryan
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Gingko Season
- A Novel
- By: Naomi Xu Elegant
- Narrated by: Cindy Kay
- Length: 7 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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After suffering her first big heartbreak two years earlier, Penelope Lin has built a quiet life with no romantic entanglements. She spends her days cataloging a museum's vast collection of Qing Dynasty bound-foot shoes and in the comfortable company of close friends. One day, she happens to meet Hoang, who confesses to releasing mice from the cancer research lab where he works. Hoang's openness catches Penelope off guard; from then on, she finds her carefully constructed life slowly start to unravel.
By: Naomi Xu Elegant
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The Book of Records
- By: Madeleine Thien
- Narrated by: Athena Karkanis, Richard Lam, Madeleine Thien, and others
- Length: 13 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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A novel that leaps across centuries past and future, as if different eras were separated by only a door. Lina and her father arrive at an enclave called The Sea, a staging post between migrations, with only a few possessions. In this mysterious and shape-shifting place, a building made of time, pasts and futures collide. Lina befriends her neighbors: Bento, a Jewish scholar in seventeenth-century Amsterdam; Blucher, a philosopher in 1930s Germany fleeing Nazi persecution; and Jupiter, a poet of Tang Dynasty China.
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The language is both brilliant and poetic
- By Robert M. Gordon, Ph.D. on 06-04-25
By: Madeleine Thien
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Abigail
- By: Magda Szabó, Len Rix - translator
- Narrated by: Samantha Desz
- Length: 13 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Abigail, the story of a headstrong teenager growing up during World War II, is the most beloved of Magda Szabo's books in her native Hungary. Gina is the only child of a general, a widower who has long been happy to spoil his bright and willful daughter. Gina is devastated when the general tells her that he must go away on a mission and that he will be sending her to boarding school in the country. She is even more aghast at the grim religious institution to which she soon finds herself consigned.
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Who knew boarding school could be exciting?
- By Wendy on 10-25-20
By: Magda Szabó, and others
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The Adversary
- A Novel
- By: Michael Crummey
- Narrated by: Mary Lewis
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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In an isolated outport on Newfoundland's northern coastline, Abe Strapp is about to marry the daughter of a rival merchant to cement his hold on the shore when the Widow Caines arrives to throw the wedding and Abe's plans into chaos. That ruthless act of sabotage is the opening salvo in a battle between the man and woman who own Mockbeggar's largest mercantile firms, each fighting for the scarce resources of the north Atlantic fishery, each seeking a measure of revenge on the person they despise most in the world.
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Meandering
- By CG on 12-09-24
By: Michael Crummey
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A Lesser Light
- A Novel
- By: Peter Geye
- Narrated by: A.W. Miller
- Length: 15 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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It's 1910, and Theodulf Sauer has finally achieved a position befitting his ego: master lighthouse keeper at a newly commissioned station towering above Lake Superior. When his new wife, Willa, arrives on the first spring ferry, it's clear her life has taken the opposite turn: after being summoned home from college to Duluth when her father dies, she and her scheming mother find themselves destitute, and Willa is rushed into this ill-suited arranged marriage. As the lighthouse station establishes, the new relationship teeters between tense and hostile.
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Best read of the year.
- By emcibi on 04-29-25
By: Peter Geye
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The Doorman
- A Novel
- By: Chris Pavone
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Chicky Diaz is everyone’s favorite doorman at the Bohemia, the most famous apartment house in the world, home of celebrities, financiers, and New York’s cultural elite. Up in the penthouse, Emily Longworth has the perfect-looking everything, all except her husband, whom she’d quietly loathed even before the recent revelations about where all the money comes from. But his wealth is immense, their prenup is iron-clad, and Emily can’t bring herself to leave him. Yet.
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Awful
- By C39LDUTBFFFQ on 06-06-25
By: Chris Pavone
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Death on the Island
- A Novel
- By: Eliza Reid
- Narrated by: Denica Fairman
- Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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A group of international players has gathered in a tiny village off the coast of Iceland for a diplomatic dinner. There’s Kristján, the mayor reeling from a personal tragedy. Graeme, the ambassador with an agenda to push. Jane, his wife, along for the ride on another one of her husband’s many business trips. And several others, from Iceland and from abroad, each with their own reason for being there, their own loyalties and grievances. By the end of the night, one of them will be dead. And it will be up to the ambassador’s wife, Jane, to figure out how—and why.
By: Eliza Reid
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Things in Nature Merely Grow
- By: Yiyun Li
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 4 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Yiyun Li’s remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance as she considers the loss of her son James. Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit.
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Be careful with this
- By whosis on 06-17-25
By: Yiyun Li
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We Pretty Pieces of Flesh
- A Novel
- By: Colwill Brown
- Narrated by: Colwill Brown
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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“Ask anyone non-Northern, they’ll only know Donny as punchline of a joke or place they changed trains once ont way to London.” But Doncaster’s also the home of Rach, Shaz, and Kel, bezzies since childhood and Donny lasses through and through. Never mind that Rach is skeptical of Shaz’s bolder plots; or that Shaz, who comes from a rougher end of town, feels left behind when the others begin plotting a course to uni; or that Kel sometimes feels split in two trying to keep the peace―the girls are inseparable, their friendship as indestructible as they are.
By: Colwill Brown