Strange Flowers cover art

Strange Flowers

 Preview
Try Standard free
Select 1 audiobook a month from our entire collection.
Listen to your selected audiobooks as long as you're a member.
Get unlimited access to bingeable podcasts.
Auto-renews at $8.99/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Strange Flowers

By: Donal Ryan
Narrated by: Donna Anita Nikolaisen
Try Standard free

Auto-renews at $8.99/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for $21.99

Buy Now for $21.99

About this listen

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

 Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Small Town & Rural

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)
All stars
Most relevant
This novel is sublimely good. The first Donal Ryan I have read and I'll now go on to read everything though I can't imagine any could be as good as this. It's a novel about the greatness in ordinary people and and the complexities in ordinary human relationships. Ryan elevates love and the emotional life to a justifiable height. Every character resonates with truth.

Gracious, deep, astounding

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.