Interview: Brian Kirk on Riverrun, Silence, and the River That Speaks

Brian Kirk lives in Clondalkin, Dublin, and writes about the city the way only someone who has walked its streets for decades can. His novel Riverrun, publishing November 24 from Library Tales, follows Philly Mackey, a boy who never speaks, through the working-class enclave of Ringsend where the Liffey and the Dodder meet. We sent Brian six questions. His answers arrived with the care of someone who has lived inside this story for a long time.

You wrote a protagonist who never speaks. What did silence let you do that dialogue never could?

The starting point of the novel for me was the idea of a boy who didn't speak. It was only when I started writing that I realised the extent of the constraint I had imposed on myself and my character, Philly. But, in the way that writing within forms in poetry can force you into interesting choices, finding ways to bring Philly's voicelessness to life allowed me to examine alternative ways of making his internal voice heard. Living things such as seagulls and the river Liffey itself are ventriloquised, inanimate objects such as a suit of armour in the museum and Ursula's old teddy bear are given a voice that may not be exactly Philly's voice but a version of it. In real world exchanges with the other characters in the novel — even his immediate family — Philly is helpless and appears dim. However, his internal imaginative flights of fancy show him to be a boy with much more going inside than he outwardly shows.

Ringsend, where the Liffey and the Dodder meet — how did the place become the book's ground floor?

After the members of the Mackey family, Ringsend is the next most important character in the book. I spent a lot of time there over the last ten years or so with my work and met lots of people who grew up in the area. I even did some writing workshops with kids in the primary schools there. It's a unique place in Dublin: a small enclave circumscribed by the Irish Sea and the rivers Liffey and Dodder. It's only a mile from Dublin city centre, but it feels like a village still. There is social deprivation for sure and high levels of social housing, yet it is nestled between affluent Sandymount to the south and Grand Canal Dock, home to many multinational tech companies to the west. It's a great place to tell a working-class story.

The Mackey family fails Philly in different ways. How did you keep each of them human while they did?

There is a temptation sometimes to write some characters off as innately bad, but readers get bored with two-dimensional characters. This is a multiple point of view novel, each of the family gets to have their moment and I wanted it to be a realistic reflection of their lives. But I also wanted to be fair to them. There are moments where each of them could perhaps have acted in a better way, but there is, I hope, a sense that they are trying, under difficult circumstances, to do the best they can. Each member of the family has been let down at different stages by people close to them, but somehow they keep going. Even Derek, for all his faults, is a source of some joy for Alice at times.

The river is a turning point in the book. What did water come to mean for you while writing it?

The Liffey literally runs through the book, from the opening pages where Philly makes his way from the museum along the quays back to the bus stop. At the critical moment in the story the river speaks to him — or he ventriloquises the river — and his future or lack of it is put at the mercy of the river. There are religious overtones, in immersion in water at baptism, which is foreshadowed in the scene where Nana takes him to the faith healer. Water is everywhere in Ringsend and in the novel: sea, Liffey and Dodder. There is also his late grandad's history as a casual dock worker which gave so much employment to local people over the years.

Riverrun carries an echo of Joyce. Is that an intentional nod, and does Dublin's literary weight shape how you write the city?

Yes, the title is an intentional nod to the first word in Joyce's Finnegans Wake. However inscrutable that particular work is to me, Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man inform my writing to a great extent. His use of multiple voices and styles in Ulysses still sets the bar for how we write novels today. Joyce's writing of the city of Dublin, his use of place, informs the way I've chosen to use Ringsend and environs in Riverrun, there can be no doubt about that.

What do you hope readers carry out of Philly's story?

Firstly, I hope readers are carried along by the story and the characters, and that Philly in particular appeals to them. As I wrote Philly, I wanted to depict his character and his hopes and fears as clearly and honestly as I could. I took advice from a Speech and Language Therapist in Dublin, Oonagh MacMahon, so that I could be confident that Philly's situation would be as authentic as possible. When readers put down the book at the end, I hope that they will feel some hope for Philly and his family while also understanding that his life will not be easy in the future. I believe there is a sense that when there is room for people to talk and to listen, there will always be some hope.

Riverrun publishes November 24, 2026, from Library Tales Publishing. Preorder here.