Description:

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 Booklist *Starred Review* Young as he is, Barry is already pushing a wheelbarrow of prizes stacked high with expectations. His first novel, City of Bohane (2012), received rapturous reviews and was a New York Times Notable Book. He has also been awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the 2011 Author’s Club Best First Novel Award, and a story from this collection won the Sunday Times Short Story Award. As the title suggests, the stories are full of starry skies and scarred and scary types. Barry’s tales feature bogs and dogs, booze and lager, drugs and suffering. One character remarks, “I was finding out how carelessly life might be lived.” Several of the denizens of this dark Ireland live very carelessly indeed, as do those in exile in England. The writing is spectacular, alternately stately and hurried, occasionally clipped but never languid, steeped in the vernacular but never lacking precision, and very often pulsing with the rhythm of iambic pentameter. Smashing, compulsively readable stuff: Barry will be a household name, and soon. --Michael Autrey ### Review “[Kevin Barry] isn't sparing with his powers. Even his throwaway lines are keepers.” ―*The New York Times* “He does humor. He does high drama. He even dabbles in horror (of a kind). And he can handle just about any other narrative form you might think of.” ―*Star Tribune (Minneapolis)* “Barry's best short stories are like a spade to the face . . . [He] earns comparison with the great and shamefully neglected V. S. Pritchett, whose short stories also employed pronounced comic means for serious, compassionate ends.” ―*The Guardian* “Outstanding . . . [These] stories triumph . . . They are funny, sad, troubling, illuminating, often in equal measure.” ―*Financial Times* “By the end of a story, Barry has me in full sympathy with someone I might edge away from on the train. His regard for characters big and small and capacity to be funny without playing them for cheap laughs recalls George Saunders.” ―*The New York Times Book Review* “Stealthy and shimmering . . . Darkness abounds in these thirteen stories, though it takes its different forms: vileness, foreboding, ignorance, isolation, self-delusion, despair.” ―*The Boston Globe* “Barry is a prose wizard whose stories pulse on the page with all the humor and viciousness of life itself.” ―*Sam Lipsyte, The Millions* “[Kevin Barry's] prose is almost literally indescribable . . . It's not hard to see a devoted following accrue around this singular talent.” ―*Irish Independent* “A startlingly unique voice.” ―*Observer (London)*