If you are the kind of reader who loves the connective tissue, the strong, sinuous, sinewy chain of narrative, you may find the quick march of the very short chapters disjointed and off-putting. These are vignettes, often powerful, sometimes too on-the-nose, but certainly never drooping or dragging. Each chapter is never more than 500 words, always with a one-word title (“Cut,” “Move,” “Demesne,” “Fear”) and ending, usually, with the kind of line associated with a short story or, perhaps less enticingly, with flash fiction. The structure of the novel is beads on a chain. Saoirse (“If she ever goes to America,” Eileen says, “the Yanks won’t have a clue how to pronounce it”) is the sun around which the other planets, including Pearl, revolve, and although the story is not always told from her point of view, Saoirse is our protagonist and our guide. Eileen is Mam to Saoirse, who will grow up to become the mother of Pearl. The four women in the household: Nana is the mother-in-law of Eileen and, after the death of Eileen’s husband, on the second page, her B.F.F. Ryan’s book is a celebration, in an embroidered, unrestrained, joyful, aphoristic and sometimes profane style, of both. If language - lyric, lovely and funny, steeped in County Tipperary - and women (men come and go, rarely center a chapter and are often useless, sometimes cruel) are of no interest to you, “The Queen of Dirt Island” is not your next read. “Strike in the name of God while the iron is hot, let you.” And the ferocious, loving, unstoppable mother, Eileen, who “in her wellingtons and yellow jacket and her film-star sunglasses … flamboyantly saluted her neighbors old and new … so that no one would be in any doubt, that she was the Queen of Dirt Island.” Love is the great triumph and the great mystery, and the love among the Aylward women of Nenagh, Ireland - relentless, reliable and hilarious - is what I think every person hopes for.

Here is the baby taking her first steps in the sunlight, “her long walk through her life.” The Nana who will not be fooled or shamed, or let you quit: “So go on, granddaughter,” she says. Underscoring and superseding all the griefs in Donal Ryan’s new novel, “The Queen of Dirt Island,” are joys of every kind.

All the griefs: death (of someone who matters on the second page, suicide, the unavoidable losses of old age) children (the impossibility of protecting them fully, their growing up and leaving, and, also, those who fail to launch) rape psychological suffering (loneliness, loss from which one cannot recover, rages burning for years).

The Queen of Dirt Island by Donal Ryan