Taking two monks as companions, he is to journey to this storm-lashed rock – a place not “tainted by the breath of the world” – and found upon it a bastion of prayer. Artt’s dream, being divinely inspired, is also highly specific. God has visited him with a dream, he explains, of a solitary island “far away, in the western ocean”. It is to general relief, then, that Artt announces his departure. Donoghue does some deft scene-setting in these early pages, giving us a strong sense of a society still stitching together its disparate fabrics, a people not so much embracing the light of Christ as putting it where it wouldn’t be in the way. Bringing with him new and uncompromising notions, he finds himself an honoured if not entirely welcome guest, refusing the abbot’s wine and disparaging his lax observance of fast days. Artt, a learned priest recently returned from afar, arrives at the monastery of Cluain Mhic Nóise. But the story’s tight focus its single, steadily rising arc and especially its walloping conclusion would have ensured a short-story version Haven the kind of immortality that Artt can only dream about.From the outset, it grounds itself in an early medieval Ireland that was much more plural and fluid than is often supposed.

Donoghue’s prose is too attentive to the craggy beauty of the island and the flutterings of Trian’s heart to suggest the book is padded. My only substantial criticism of Haven sounds more harsh than I mean it to: This novel could have been a classic short story. Trian’s affection for his companions, the birds, the island - everything - is so sweet and vulnerable that tragedy starts to haunt these pages like the coming winter. The effect is transporting, sometimes unsettling and eventually shocking. Her narration stays close to their minds, which are about as free of sin as this story is of irony. Their foolish destruction of the island’s resources will resonate with contemporary readers, but she refuses to reduce these characters to symbols of modern exigencies. Donoghue works subtly in the margins, letting these three men evolve into their distinct roles. The result is a story of survival trapped in a very small space, completely cut off from the world: Room with a view. The challenges - what to eat, where to sleep - are exacerbated by Artt’s fanatical insistence that they immediately build a stone church and begin copying Bibles. The drama of this novel accumulates slowly, like the fresh water in their cistern. But Haven creates an eerie, meditative atmosphere that should resonate with anyone willing to think deeply about the blessings and costs of devoting one’s life to a transcendent cause.

very few readers have been praying for a novel like this.

Haven donoghue