... Reminiscent of Murakami before he became big or Beckett after he became an adjective (...) Hession delivers a series of emotional sucker punches that turn things upside down. Readers of his previous work will recognize the resulting quirkiness-to-poignancy whiplash. It is at this point that Ghost Mountain becomes so much more that its peculiar hook. Grief, longing and questions of connection begin to colour an already rich palette, and negotiating these as much as the narrative rupture represented by the mountain becomes the throughline of the book’s latter sections. Hession grants his readers the privilege of watching his characters grow in response to these trials over long stretches of time, with their efforts to integrate the new mountain into their worldview serving, symbolically, as an attempt to control their own lives. Some succeed at this, some fail, but the journeys we accompany them on are moving and hilarious in equal measure. With Ghost Mountain, Ronan Hession has created something different. It is certainly a stranger book than his previous work, but in that lies its unique charm. We are very lucky that there are novels like this being written in Ireland today. ——The Irish Times

... The sort of clear and precise writing that goes down like a cold glass of sparkling water: refreshingand exact (...) Ghost Mountain offers us a vista of workaday life that doesn’t flinch from the bleak or the disastrous: characters behave poorly, lie, cheat, die in bad circumstances, are forgotten. But at the same time we see in them tenderness and consideration and attentiveness; we see families split, but we also see them form; we see the care and solicitude that makes for love even in a world that’s as inscrutable as the mountain itself. The characters that people Ghost Mountain, that circumnavigate and scale its slopes, the maybe-cultists and dog-walkers and lonely kids and artists and bewildered widowers and abandoned wives, all circle each other and make space for each other; the joy the reader experiences is the gentle satisfaction and relief of witnessing people make homes, and the sadness is that of watching those homes crumbling in ways that we’re all intimately familiar with. That is: Hession captures the flux of human emotions and connections and disconnections in a way that evades drama and embraces nuance and reminds us, if we’ve forgotten, that all the people around us are themselves quietly suffering and celebrating and are deserving of generosity and compassion. A beautiful book that’s poignant and funny and endlessly startling – just as we’d hoped! ——Bookmunch

Love, life and death, and a mountain that wasn’t there yesterday. Rónán Hession is a great writer, and his new novel is a wonderful thing. ——Paul Thornton

A writer of his own perfectly definable style, Rónán Hession’s books truly are a thing to behold, and to treasure. Ghost Mountain, his new joyous offering, tackles themes relatable to all readers with both humour and sensitivity, and always with the most wickedly wonderful turn of phrase. It is a brilliant work of art, with a cast of characters as memorable and entertaining as Under Milk Wood. Another triumphant book, by a writer who must be held in the highest esteem. ——Phil, bookseller at Waterstones

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This is a novel about Ghost Mountain, a mountain that is higher than all around it, though not very high. Limpet-shaped, it is bare and rounded, like a knee. The sunken hollows on its slope lend it a haunted expression, giving the mountain its name. It is unfathomable.
All we know is that it appeared yesterday.
The appearance of Ghost Mountain leads to a disturbance in the lives of the local people: the town drunk, the Clerk of Maps and his wife with corkscrew curls, an early-retired art teacher and her dog, a young man who is a young soul and his young wife who is an old soul.
Ghost Mountain is a simple fable-like novel about a mountain that appears suddenly and the way in which its manifestation ripples through the lives of characters in the surrounding community.

It looks at the uncertain fragile sense of self we hold inside ourselves, and our human compulsion to project it into the uncertain word around us, whether we’re ready or not. It is also about the presence of absence, and how it shadows us in our lives. Mountains are at once unmistakably present yet never truly fathomable.

RONAN HESSION, also known as the Dublin-based songwriter Mumblin' Deaf Ro, is an Irish writer who lives in Dublin. His debut novel Leonard and Hungry Paul was published by Bluemoose Books in 2019. The Sunday Times chose it as one of the 50 great Irish novels of the century. It has been selected as the 2021 One Dublin One Book by Dublin UNESCO City of Literature. It was shortlisted for the An Post Irish Book Awards; Best Newcomer, Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. The British Book Awards, Debut Book of The Year. Books Are My Bag Awards; Fiction. The Dalkey Emerging Writer Award. The McKitterick Prize. His second novel, Panenka, was shortlisted for the An Post Irish Books Award for Novel of the Year and the Books Are My Bag Awards Novel of the Year, and Ronan himself was shortlisted for the An Post Irish Book Awards Author of the Year. His short story, The Translator’s Funeral was shortlisted for the An Post Irish Book Awards Writing Short Story of the Year.
As Mumblin’ Deaf Ro he has released three albums of story telling songs. His third album Dictionary Crimes was shortlisted for The Choice Music Album of the Year.