Homesickness

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

From the prize-winning author of YOUNG SKINS, comes HOMESICKNESS - a quietly caustic, startlingly beautiful and wonderfully wry new short story collection.

In these eight stories, Barrett takes us back to the barren backwaters of County Mayo, via Toronto, and illuminates the lives of outcasts, misfits and malcontents with an eye for the abrupt and absurd. A quiet night in the neighbourhood pub is shattered by the arrival of a sword wielding fugitive. A funeral party teeters on the edge of this world and the next, as ghosts won't simply lay in wake. A shooting sees an everyday call-out lead a policewoman to confront the banality of her own existence.

A true follow-up to his electrifying debut collection, HOMESICKNESS marks Colin Barrett out as our most brilliantly original and captivating storyteller.

'A mesmerisingly powerful book, full of the strangeness and beauty of life' Sally Rooney

'Addictive, stylish and violently funny... An outstanding collection' Kevin Barry

© Colin Barrett 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Critics Review

A mesmerisingly powerful book, full of the strangeness and beauty of life. I've learned so much from Colin Barrett's work as a reader and writer...these stories are his best yet
Sally Rooney
Full of humour and small-town Irish colour... His [Barrett's] second collection confirms him as one of the very best short-story writers in the business
New Statesman, *Books of the Year*
A masterwork - by turns hilarious and heartbreaking... What fierce, tender stories. Totally unforgettable
Brandon Taylor
The stories in Homesickness are crafted with skill and flair. Colin Barrett anchors the work with emotional accuracy and careful delineation of character, and then, using metaphors and beautifully made sentences, he lets his narrative soar
Colm Toibin
Lyrical and tough and smart... His stories are set in a familiar emotional landscape, but they give us endings that are new
Anne Enright
Addictive, stylish and violently funny stories, with riches on every page - an outstanding collection
Kevin Barry
Shot through with dark humor, pitch-perfect dialogue and a signature freshness that makes life palpable on the page...Homesickness is graced with an original, lingering beauty
Stuart Dybek, New York Times Book Review
Even though we rarely enter their internal worlds, Colin Barrett conjures interiority through his linguistic precision and attention to external detail, so that each story lingers in the mind and haunts its successors
Times Literary Supplement
Superb...[T]here is an utterness to his attention, a devotion to the lives of his characters, that shifts the work into some more lasting place. Barrett is already one of the leading writers of the Irish short story, which is to braggingly say, one of the leading writers of the short story anywhere. He means every word and regrets every word. He just kills it
Guardian
Something struck me as I read these beautifully crafted, desperately sad, but often very funny stories: there is now a branch of English called the Colin Barrett
Roddy Doyle

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