This is the choice for this month's morning book club in Scariff Public Library. I chose it for two reasons, one because I heard Kevin Barry on the radio and he sounded so nice and made me laugh and two because it it short-listed for the 2013 IMPAC award, the only Irish writer on the list!
The once-great city of Bohane on the west coast of Ireland is on its knees. Infested by vice and split along triballines, there are still some posh parts of town but it is in the slums and backstreets of Smoketown, the tower blocks of the Northside Rises and the eerie bogs of Big Nothin’ that the city really lives. For years, Bohane has been in the cool grip of Logan Hartnett, the dapper godfather of the Hartnett Fancy gang. But now they say his old nemesis is back in town; his trusted henchmen are getting ambitious and there’s trouble in the air...
The author
In 2007 he won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature for his short story collection There are Little Kingdoms. In 2011 he released his debut novel City of Bohane, which was followed in 2012 by his latest short story collection Dark Lies the Island.
Barry spent much of his youth travelling, accumulating 17 addresses by the time he was 36. He lived variously in Cork, Santa Barbara, Barcelona, Liverpool before settling in Sligo, purchasing and renovating a run-down RIC barracks. The decision to settle down was driven primarily by the increasing difficulty in moving large quantities of books from house to house.
City of Bohane by Kevin Barry - May 2013
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