The Divine Ryans

Born into a screwy Irish-Canadian family, nine-year-old Draper Doyle Ryan faces visitations by his deceased father, hockey expectations, and his own dawning sexuality with humor and charm. Reprint. Movie tie-in.

hor of The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, "An absolute stunner--achingly funny, needle-sharp, and packing an unexpected wallop...the literary equivalent of a small-budget movie masterpiece with heart, soul, and brains"(Time Out).

The Ryans of St. John's, Newfoundland, are a large and deeply eccentric Irish-Catholic family in the dual business of newspaper-publishing and undertaking--"one-hundred years of digging up dirt of one kind or another," as Uncle Reginald puts it. Enough Ryans also become priests and nuns to earn them the sobriquet "Divine."

The youngest member of the family is nine-year-old Draper Doyle Ryan, whose passion for the Catholic Montreal Canadiens in their battles against the Protestant Toronto Maple Leafs is matched only by his perplexity over his recently deceased father's regular reappearances, hockey puck in hand, in the house next door. How he comes to make sense of these visitations, his gently scr