Kevin Barry

“En blændende fortælling om elskende på flugt” The Guardian "Et ekstravagant eventyr ... Kevin Barrys bedste" The Times "Brutal og vidunderlig" The Economist Året er 1891, stedet Butte, Montana. Tom Rourke er digter, dranker og drømmer. Han får gratis drinks og opium ved at skrive kærlighedsbreve for minearbejderne og en lille slat penge ved at gå til hånde hos byens gale bryllupsfotograf, hvor han møder den nyslåede brud, Polly Gillespie, netop ankommet med toget fra Chicago. En forrykt gnist springer mellem de to og tvinger dem på vild flugt fra voldelige og mildest talt uligevægtige dusørjægere. Kevin Barry (f. 1969) bor i County Sligo, Irland, og er forfatter til fire romaner og tre novellesamlinger. Om inspirationen til denne roman, den første oversat til dansk, fortæller han: “I forsommeren 1999 vandrede jeg i bjergene i West Cork i Irland og var ved at falde ned i et hul i jorden. Det var en del af nogle gamle, uhyggelige, forladte kobberminer; jeg fandt ud af, at driften ophørte i 1880’erne, og at alle minearbejderne fra Cork var immigreret til Butte, Montana. Jeg tænkte: Her ligger en western med Cork-accent! Jeg rejste til Butte og lavede min research, men det tog yderligere 23 år, før bogens hovedpersoner dukkede op – sådan noget tager af og til sin tid.”

A savagely funny, achingly beautiful tale set in the Wild West, from the Booker-longlisted author of Night Boat to Tangier

A BEST BOOK OF 2024 FROM THE ECONOMIST AND THE MINNESOTA STAR TRIBUNE Award-winning writer Kevin Barry's first novel set in America, a savagely funny and achingly romantic tale of young lovers on the lam in 1890s Montana. "A wedding of Cormac McCarthy with Flann O'Brien; a western but also the most Irish of novels; a tragedy written as farce . . . inspiring joy with every incident, every concept, every sentence."-- The Guardian October 1891. A hard winter approaches across the Rocky Mountains. The city of Butte, Montana is rich on copper mines and rampant with vice and debauchery among a hard-living crowd of immigrant Irish workers. Here we find Tom Rourke, a young poet and ballad-maker of the town, but also a doper, a drinker, and a fearsome degenerate. Just as he feels his life is heading nowhere fast, Polly Gillespie arrives in town as the new bride of the extremely devout mine captain Long Anthony Harrington. A thunderbolt love affair takes spark between Tom and Polly and they strike out west on a stolen horse, moving through the badlands of Montana and Idaho, and briefly an idyll of wild romance perfects itself. But a posse of deranged Cornish gunmen are soon in hot pursuit and closing in fast. With everything to lose and the safety and anonymity of San Francisco still a distant speck on their horizon, the choices they make will haunt them for the rest of their lives. In this love story for the ages--lyrical, profane and propulsive--Kevin Barry has once again demonstrated himself to be a master stylist, an unrivalled humourist, and a true poet of the human heart.

A BEST BOOK OF 2024 FROM THE ECONOMIST AND THE MINNESOTA STAR TRIBUNE Award-winning writer Kevin Barry's first novel set in America, a savagely funny and achingly romantic tale of young lovers on the lam in 1890s Montana. "A wedding of Cormac McCarthy with Flann O'Brien; a western but also the most Irish of novels; a tragedy written as farce . . . inspiring joy with every incident, every concept, every sentence."-- The Guardian October 1891. A hard winter approaches across the Rocky Mountains. The city of Butte, Montana is rich on copper mines and rampant with vice and debauchery among a hard-living crowd of immigrant Irish workers. Here we find Tom Rourke, a young poet and ballad-maker of the town, but also a doper, a drinker, and a fearsome degenerate. Just as he feels his life is heading nowhere fast, Polly Gillespie arrives in town as the new bride of the extremely devout mine captain Long Anthony Harrington. A thunderbolt love affair takes spark between Tom and Polly and they strike out west on a stolen horse, moving through the badlands of Montana and Idaho, and briefly an idyll of wild romance perfects itself. But a posse of deranged Cornish gunmen are soon in hot pursuit and closing in fast. With everything to lose and the safety and anonymity of San Francisco still a distant speck on their horizon, the choices they make will haunt them for the rest of their lives. In this love story for the ages--lyrical, profane and propulsive--Kevin Barry has once again demonstrated himself to be a master stylist, an unrivalled humourist, and a true poet of the human heart.

THE SUNDAY TIMES HISTORICAL NOVEL OF THE YEARTHE INSTANT IRISH TIMES BESTSELLERPICKED AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE GUARDIAN, NEW STATESMAN, OBSERVER, IRISH TIMES, INDEPENDENT, IRISH INDEPENDENT, IRISH EXAMINER, TLS, SCOTSMAN, THE TIMES AND ECONOMISTWhat if we ride out tonight? What if we ride out and never once look back? October, 1891. Butte, Montana. A hard winter approaches across the Rocky Mountains. The city is rich on copper mines and rampant with vice and debauchery among a hard-living crowd of immigrant Irish workers. Here we find Tom Rourke, a young poet and balladmaker, but also a doper, a drinker and a fearsome degenerate. Just as he feels his life is heading nowhere fast, Polly Gillespie arrives in town as the new bride of the devout mine captain Long Anthony Harrington. A thunderbolt love affair takes spark between Tom and Polly and they strike out west on a stolen horse, moving through the badlands of Montana and Idaho. Briefly an idyll of wild romance perfects itself. But a posse of deranged Cornish gunsmen are soon in hot pursuit of the lovers, and closing in fast . . .

ONE OF BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR - LIBRARY JOURNAL A collection of short stories of rural Ireland in the classic Irish mode: full of love (and sex), melancholy and magic, bedecked in some of the most gorgeous prose being written today--from the author of the wildly acclaimed Night Boat to Tangier. With three novels and two short story collections published, Kevin Barry has steadily established his stature as one of the finest writers not just in Ireland but in the English language. All of his prodigious gifts of language, character, and setting in these eleven exquisite stories transport the reader to an Ireland both timeless and recognizably modern. Shot through with dark humor and the uncanny power of the primal and unchanging Irish landscape, the stories in That Old Country Music represent some of the finest fiction being written today.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE EDGE HILL SHORT STORY PRIZE'One of the best collections you'll read this year' Sunday Times'Wild, witty stories . . . Exhilarating' ObserverIn this rapturous story collection we encounter a ragbag of west of Ireland characters, many on the cusp between love and catastrophe, heartbreak and epiphany, resignation and hope. These stories affirm Kevin Barry as one of the world's most accomplished and gifted writers, and show an Ireland in a condition of great flux but also as a place where older rhythms, and an older magic, somehow persist.

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR - "A darkly incantatory tragicomedy of love and betrayal ... Beautifully paced, emotionally wise." --The Boston Globe In the dark waiting room of the ferry terminal in the sketchy Spanish port of Algeciras, two aging Irishmen--Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond, longtime partners in the lucrative and dangerous enterprise of smuggling drugs--sit at night, none too patiently. The pair are trying to locate Maurice's estranged daughter, Dilly, whom they've heard is either arriving on a boat coming from Tangier or departing on one heading there. This nocturnal vigil will initiate an extraordinary journey back in time to excavate their shared history of violence, romance, mutual betrayals, and serial exiles. Rendered with the dark humor and the hardboiled Hibernian lyricism that have made Kevin Barry one of the most striking and admired fiction writers at work today, Night Boat to Tangier is a superbly melancholic melody of a novel, full of beautiful phrases and terrible men.

The Booker-longlisted novel, drenched in sex, death and narcotics, in sudden violence, old magic and the mysteries of love, from the winner of the IMPAC Award and the Goldsmiths Prize

This award-winning story collection summons all the laughter, darkness and intensity of contemporary Irish life. A pair of fast girls court trouble as they cool their heels on a slow night in a small town. Lonesome hillwalkers take to the high reaches in pursuit of a saving embrace. A bewildered man steps off a country bus in search of his identity - and a stiff drink. These stories, filled with a grand sense of life's absurdity, form a remarkably surefooted collection that reads like a modern-day Dubliners.

A New York Times Notable Book - It is 1978, and John Lennon has escaped New York City to try to find the island off the west coast of Ireland he bought eleven years prior. Leaving behind domesticity, his approaching forties, his inability to create, and his memories of his parents, he sets off to calm his unquiet soul in the comfortable silence of isolation. But when he puts himself in the hands of a shape-shifting driver full of Irish charm and dark whimsy, what ensues can only be termed a magical mystery tour. Beatlebone is a tour de force of language and literary imagination, a surreal novel that blends fantasy and reality--a Hibernian high wire act of courage, nerve, and great beauty.

Winner of the Goldsmiths prize and shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year

Kevin Barry's deliciously wicked collection "Dark Lies the Island" delivers on the many reckless promises made by his virtuosic and prizewinning debut novel, "City of Bohane." It firmly establishes him as both a world-class word slinger and a masterful storyteller.

From the author of City of Bohane, a debut collection that "could easily have been titled 'These Are Little Masterpieces'" (The Irish Times) This award-winning story collection by Kevin Barry summons all the laughter, darkness, and intensity of contemporary Irish life. A pair of fast girls court trouble as they cool their heels on a slow night in a small town. Lonesome hill walkers take to the high reaches in pursuit of a saving embrace. A bewildered man steps off a country bus in search of his identity--and a stiff drink. These stories, filled with a grand sense of life's absurdity, form a remarkably sure-footed collection that reads like a modern-day Dubliners. The winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and a 2007 book of the year in The Irish Times, the Sunday Tribune, and Metro, There Are Little Kingdoms marks the stunning entrance of a writer who burst onto the literary scene fully formed.

Edited by award winning novelist and short story writer Kevin Barry, this volume will once again mix established names with previously unpublished authors, and will seek to offer fresh renditions to the Irish story - new angles, new approaches, new modes of attack. Published in 2011, New Irish Short Stories, edited by Joseph O'Connor, has sold over 10,000 copies to date and featured Kevin Barry's 'Beer Trip to Llandudno' - winner of the 2012 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Prize - as well as stories by William Trevor, Dermot Bolger and Roddy Doyle which went on to be Afternoon Readings on BBC Radio 4.

"Extraordinary . . . Barry takes us on a roaring journey . . . Powerful, exuberant fiction." --The New York Times Book Review (front cover) Forty or so years in the future. The once-great city of Bohane on the west coast of Ireland is on its knees, infested by vice and split along tribal lines. There are the posh parts of town, but it is in the slums and backstreets of Smoketown, the tower blocks of the North Rises, and the eerie bogs of the Big Nothin' that the city really lives. For years it has all been under the control of Logan Hartnett, the dapper godfather of the Hartnett Fancy gang. But there's trouble in the air. They say Hartnett's old nemesis is back in town; his trusted henchmen are getting ambitious; and his missus wants him to give it all up and go straight. Kevin Barry's City of Bohane combines Celtic myth and a Caribbean beat, fado and film, graphic-novel cool and all the ripe inheritance of Irish literature to create something hilarious, beautiful, and startlingly new.

Winner of the Sunday Times short story prizeWinner of the Edge Hill short story prizeA kiss that just won't happen.

**Winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award** â?? A electrifying masterpieceâ?? Joseph Oâ?? Connor The once-great city of Bohane on the west coast of Ireland is on its knees, infested by vice and split along tribal lines.