Hawthorn and Child - Hardcover

Ridgway's best compositions can be breathtakingly unpredictable ... At his best, Ridgway is unapologetically strange. And the writing is perfectly assured and elegant. --Scarlett Thomas, Guardian

This is a detective novel in which the mysteries of people's lives threaten to overshadow mysteries born of criminal activity ... The real subject of the novel, perhaps, is how mysterious we are to one another and how lives are damaged, sometimes irreparably, by the gaps of comprehension. Ridgway, a Dublin author who lived in north London for more than a decade, writes these interlocking stories with the keen sense of place and lucid, pared-down prose of a good crime novel, which makes the more outlandish deviations from the genre even more arresting ... No clear answers are forthcoming, but that doesn't make the novel any less engaging ... This unusual detective story takes the wisdom of his observation on board, and runs with it. --Observer

Everything about this vibrant, wonderfully written novel is alive, funny and deeply troubled.
It s brilliantly well done, as is everything in this muted technical tour de force ... Read Hawthorn & Child. Better still read it twice: it s that real, that good, that true. --Irish Times

The two protagonists of the title are mid-ranking policemen operating amongst London's criminal classes, but each is plagued by dreams of elsewhere and, in the case of Hawthorn, a nightlife of visceral intensity that sits at odds with his carefully-composed placid family mask but has the habit of spilling over into his working life as a policeman. Ridgway has much to say, through showing not telling, about male violence, crowd psychology, the borders between play and abuse, and the motivations of policemen and criminals. But this is no humdrum crime novel. Ridgway is writing about people whose understanding of their own situations is only partial and fuzzy, who are consumed by emotions and motivations and narratives, or the lack thereof, that they cannot master. He focuses on peripheral figures to whom things happen, and happen confusingly, and his fictional strategies reflect this focus, so that his fictions themselves have an air of incompleteness and frustration about them. It's a high-wire act for a novelist but one that commands attention and provokes the dropping of jaws.