Donal Ryan won the Guardian First Book Award and Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards and landed a spot on the Man Booker Prize longlist for his debut novel, The Spinning Heart (2012). In that impressive work, Donal Ryan captured the myriad voices of an Irish community in financial and moral crisis. However, the first book he wrote was actually The Thing About December (2013), and knowing that fact allows one to think of this as a kind of rehearsal for a greater achievement.

Whereas The Spinning Heart has 21 narrators’ voices, The Thing About December has just one – that of Johnsey Cunliffe, a simple young man who lost his father to cancer last year and now, after his mother’s sudden death, has to decide what to do with his parents’ property.

With village bullies, land-grabbers and journalists hounding his every move, it is uncertain whether Johnsey will be among those who benefit from the upsurge of the ‘Celtic Tiger’. Even after the shock of bereavement fades, he endures daily depression and isolation, as well as a brutal beating. “Sadness plus sadness equals more sadness. Sadness begets sadness … Loneliness covers the earth like a blanket.” It is hardly a surprise that suicide seems to him an increasingly appealing option.

The novel is composed of twelve chronological chapters, each named after a month. Although it is not quite written in the first-person, you would be forgiven for thinking it is – that is just how intimately Ryan’s third-person limited point-of-view (and some occasional bursts of the second-person, ‘you’) recreates Johnsey’s perspective. Ryan has a wonderful ear for voices, and here you get Johnsey’s thoughts and words as if from his own mouth; unfiltered, as it were, by narrative conventions like speech marks.

There is a slightly run-on, stream-of-consciousness element here, similar to what you’d find in the works of other Irish writers like Anne Enright, Colm Tóibín, or even James Joyce. The thick Irish dialect and slang may take a while to get used to, but with a little persistence it soon becomes natural. After all, novelist Sebastian Barry insists in his review for the Guardian, “it is exciting to be closed out for a moment from your own language.” He also advises that this is a novel that “would benefit from being read out loud.”

Indeed, I can see how hearing this as an audio book would prove to be a unique experience. A carefully chosen voice could bring comic lines like this one to life: “where all the cool lads were and a few girls acting like they were disgusted with the cool lads but you could tell they weren’t really, and a couple of nervous-looking spastics standing to the side, like bits of auld watery broccoli beside a plate of steak and chips.”

“Time drips by. It never flies, really.” Here Ryan sets up careful gradations of experience of time, memory, money and despair. The persistence of grief and the difficulty of everyday life cannot fail to earn readers’ sympathy. Johnsey is a memorable character, and the jolt of the book’s ending means you will not forget it for some time to come. “That’s the thing about December: it goes by you in a flash. If you just close your eyes, it’s gone. And it’s like you were never there.” Recommended for fans of Nathan Filer’s The Shock of the Fall.