Review | ‘All Them Dogs’ by Djamel White: Irish gangster noir meets forbidden love

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. Take Aengus Lavelle, for example. He is the gym owner and drug lord who employs Flute and Wardy. His daughter Fanny, who has trained in the gym with her father since she was a little girl, is being groomed to take over Aengus’ chair, but you can clearly see how and why Aengus is conflicted over this decision. White obeys the “show, don’t tell” rule to a T here, with subtle shifts in Aengus’ speech patterns and his demeanour signalling his quiet disapproval whenever his daughter does something ill-advised. Author Djamel White | Photo Credit: Conor Horgan (thebookerprizes.com) Brutal, gritty and strictly functionalThe novel’s big draw, however, remains the Wardy-Flute pairing; two hyper-masculine, ultra-violent men who find themselves softening inside and out despite their best efforts to keep this process at bay. Of course, softness of any kind is incompatible with the reality of being a gangster and this imbues their private moments with a kind of irresistible fragility. In these sequences, White’s prose pulls off a neat trick that he repeats a few times across the book; we don’t really mind this because the execution is so good throughout.The trick is quite straightforward, really — he writes about sex as though he were describing a crime, and he writes about crime as though it were primarily an erotic phenomenon. Observe the beats of this ‘switcheroo’ technique in the following passage, where Wardy is hypnotised by Flute’s pearly whites. “Something about this fella’s skin, man. Even with the wind it didn’t go all red like everyone else’s. His gaze was like a flashlight that just caught you rapid in the back seat, joint half rolled on your lap. But I made sure I kept looking at them, avoiding the pull of his nose and cheekbones that swooped down to a full mouth that I knew had real, perfect teeth, even though I had never seen him smile. A waste. I’d be cracking safes with a set like that.” As the noir-ish rhythms of the story carry it towards its third act, the stakes rise sharply for both Wardy and Flute, especially after Aengus orders them to “take out” (kill) a fellow drug dealer. Two men for whom violence is as natural as breathing are suddenly second-guessing each other while on assignment — predictably, things go sideways and the ripple effect engulfs practically every character in the book.And when the climactic violence unfolds, it is never aesthetically assured or balletic like a Tarantino movie — it is brutal, gritty and strictly functional, which adds to the book’s sense of realism. All Them Dogs is a mighty impressive debut and on the evidence of this book, we ought to expect truly great things from Djamel White in the future. All Them Dogs Djamel WhiteJohn Murray₹699The reviewer is working on his first book of non-fiction. Published - November 06, 2026 06:15 pm IST