A quick follow-up to my last post on recent comings-and-goings of Uimhir a Cúig featured writers – well the ink was barely dry on the news that Kevin Barry has a new novel, Beatlebone, forthcoming when the folks over at the £10,000 Goldsmiths Prize included his yet to-be released novel on their six-title shortlist! My hearthiest congratulations to one of Ireland’s finest writers.
The prize was created to honour “fiction that breaks the mould or opens up new possibilities for the novel form”. Fellow Irish writer Eimear McBride, whose daring debut novel A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing won the inaugural prize in 2013, was one of this year’s judges & had this to say: “Beatlebone by Kevin Barry is a storm of a novel – unsettling and mesmerising. It’s formally interesting also, with the novelist choosing to step on and off the page.”
“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 nine years prior. Leaving behind domesticity, his approaching forties, his inability to create, and his memories of his parents, he sets off to find calm 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.”
It almost sounds like a description of the writer himself, “a shape-shifting driver full of Irish charm and dark whimsy”. Well I, for one, eagerly look forward to the ride.
—Gerard Beirne