When a young woman vanishes from her parents’ home in rural Tipperary it can mean only one of two things: “Moll Gladney was either pregnant or dead, and it was hard to know which one of those was worse...As ever, he builds exquisite sentences, aching to be read aloud.....Ryan’s inhabitation of Alexander and his son, Joshua, is disappointing. For a novel that so emphatically forefronts not just questions of prejudice, but of blackness and black identity, Strange Flowers achieves little beyond a gestural rendering of village racism. “ ..... Strange Flowers may be the weakest of Ryan’s novels, but it is still a gorgeously wrought book – compassionate without dissolving into nostalgia