PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Kevin Barry is the author of three novels and two other short story collections. His awards include the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award and the Lannan Foundation Literary Award. His stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta and elsewhere. He also works as a playwright and screenwriter, and he lives in County Sligo, Ireland. His latest novel, Night Boat to Tangier, was an Irish number one bestseller, was longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards.
Handled with such delicacy, economy and depth of feeling without sentimentality, the people of this little masterpiece - people flawed, driven and full of longing - were my companions for days after the last paragraph of the story had been read -- WENDY ERSKINE * * Caught by the River * * Barry is wickedly funny, slyly transgressive and consistently brilliant. He is constantly turning tricks with language before upending us on the thwarted desires of his characters and the dark energy of his landscapes. And underpinning it all, the melancholy of men that is Barry's hallmark -- MARY COSTELLO Full of the damaged characters, menacing rural scenery and darkly comic, slantwise prose that have become his trademark . . . At each turn, Barry makes his fiction a matter of life and death * * New Statesman * * An extraordinary writer . . . In his short stories Barry seems most fully and brilliantly himself . . . Unimprovable masterpieces . . . So rich and so flawlessly crafted - its best stories feel instantly canonical, as if we've already been reading them for years . . . The opening story is letter-perfect from its first line . . . Funny, moving, built with superior economy, this is the real thing . . . Barry remains the great romantic of contemporary Irish fiction. Like all of the most interesting artists, he gets better with every risk he takes. The courage may be his. But the rewards are all ours -- Kevin Power * * Irish Independent * * Beautifully pitched short stories . . . A richly comic collection from an Irish maestro . . . Barry holds myth-making and dull reality in teasing balance, with a kind of comic double vision winking at the operatic and the bathetic by turns * * Guardian * * These playful, serious and beautifully crafted stories allow Barry to experiment as we need great writers to do -- SARAH MOSS * * Irish Times * * Barry often writes with sonorous wisdom . . . but as readers of his grimly hilarious novels will know, his language is just as precise when it is in the service of comedy . . . Exhilaratingly funny and poignant fables -- Jake Kerridge * * Sunday Telegraph * * These are brilliant and vivid and uproarious stories. It's a rare writer who can call a tune like Kevin Barry -- LISA McINERNEY Wild, witty stories . . . The west of Ireland teems with canny characters and vivid language . . . Darkly glimmering . . . Their language is exhilarating, its verve evoking the very best of Barry's compatriots while further carving out a territory that's all his own * * Observer * * The master short story teller turns messy emotions into riveting tales of wounded Irish folk . . . One of the best collections you'll read this year * * Sunday Times * *
