Review | ‘All Them Dogs’ by Djamel White: Irish gangster noir meets forbidden love
The Hindu · Aditya Mani Jha ·
A gritty Irish gangster noir debut, All Them Dogs blends brutal crime with forbidden romance and sharp, dialect-rich prose.
In 1993, Scottish writer Irvine Welsh published his barnstorming debut novel Trainspotting, about a group of heroin-addict friends in Edinburgh engaging in increasingly self-destructive activities. With the release of the eponymous Danny Boyle film a few years later, there was a surge in interest around contemporary Scotland, especially the Scots dialect that Welsh used so well for the novel’s punchy, uproarious dialogue. And what Welsh did for the Scottish in the 90s, Djamel White has done for the Irish in 2026, with his brilliant debut novel All Them Dogs.
Longlisted for the Booker Prize this year, the book follows gangster Tony “Wardy” Ward who returns to Dublin after five years on the run, only to begin a forbidden romance with his fellow enforcer Darren “Flute” Walsh. As they go about town collecting debts, bashing heads, smoking joints and engaging in covert trysts, their relationship swings between unexpected tenderness and more familiar patterns of violence and paranoia. All Them Dogs sizzles off the page, not just because of the sexually charged energy between Wardy and Flute, but also because of the electric, Irish-flavoured street argot that is the book’s dominant register. “Gaffs” (houses), “bag” (marijuana), “craic” (gossip), “gear” (heroin) — by the end of the book, you will be rattling these off inside your head effortlessly.
White, 28, has a real gift for sketching familial dysfunction and extracting dramatic mileage from everyday conflicts. The big one is the relationship between Wardy and his mother Jenny, but there’s also his self-righteous half-brother Archie who does not want him anywhere near the family home. There’s a great moment when Flute teases Wardy by airily saying that he remembers Archie from school, the implication being that Archie was at least bi-curious, if not secretly queer. Even the secondary characters on display have all sorts of messy, complex, fascinating equations with their parents.
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