This is the Ritual
'Doyle is as good as everyone – from John Boyne to Colm Tóibín – says he is' Daily Mail
A young man in a dark depression roams the vast, formless landscape of a Dublin industrial park where he meets a vagrant in the grip of a dangerous ideology. A woman fleeing a break-up finds herself taking part in an unusual sleep experiment. A man obsessed with Nietzsche clings desperately to his girlfriend’s red shoes. And whatever happened to Killian Turner, Ireland’s vanished literary outlaw?
Lost and isolated, the characters in these masterful stories play out their fragmented relationships in a series of European cities, always on the move; from rented room to darkened apartment, hitchhiker's roadside to Barcelona nightclub. Rob Doyle, a shape-shifting drifter, a reclusive writer, also stalks the book's pages.
Layering narratives and splicing fiction with non-fiction, This is the Ritual tells of the ecstatic, the desperate and the uncertain. Immersive, at times dreamlike, and frank in its depiction of sex, the writer's life, failed ideals and the transience of emotions, it introduces an unmistakable new literary voice.
Rob Doyle was born in Dublin and holds a first-class honours degree in Philosophy and an MPhil in Psychoanalysis from Trinity College Dublin. Rob Doyle’s widely acclaimed first novel, Here Are the Young Men, was published in 2014 by Bloomsbury and the Lilliput Press. It was chosen as a book of the year by the Irish Times, Independent, Sunday Times and Sunday Business Post, and was shortlisted in the Best Newcomer category for the Bord Gáis Irish Book Awards. It was also named as one Ireland's twenty greatest novels since 1916 by Hot Press magazine. Rob’s fiction, essays and criticism have been published in many newspapers and journals. He currently lives in Paris.
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