Name: Shona Tiger's review of Homesickness by Colin Barrett
Item: Homesickness
Rating: 3
Author: Shona Tiger

Colin Barrett

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. Praise for YOUNG SKINS 'One of the best books of the past decade... The characters are edgy, often violent, locked into a world described in ways that are both harsh and tender' Colm T ibin, Washington Post 'Language, structure, style - Colin Barrett has all the weapons at his disposal, and how, and he has an intuitive sense for what a short story is, and what it can do' Kevin Barry 'Colin Barrett is a young man in the town of the short story, but it's fair to say he has the run of the place' Jon McGregor 'Colin Barrett's sentences are lyrical and tough and smart... His stories are set in a familiar emotional landscape, but they give us endings that are new' Anne Enright

Homesickness

Genesis (@whisperingchapters)

Shona Tiger

Thank you to NetGalley and to Grove Press for this eARC.

This collection will probably appeal a lot more to people with local knowledge, but it’s still an evocative, quick and pleasant enough read.

There are eight stories, many of which begin in media res and end without real resolution, so that each feels like a quick study, a snapshot of different lives. I found this rather less than satisfying—perhaps everyone’s quibble with the short story format—and it brought down my rating of the collection. I did like that the characters are ordinary people, people like me, that these are stories about working class lives. My favourite story was the one about the guy who walks into a bar with a sword.

CW for suicide, death.

Rated: 6/10

Genesis (@whisperingchapters) &
Homesickness by Colin Barrett

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Genesis (@whisperingchapters) &Homesickness by Colin Barrett

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Genesis (@whisperingchapters) &
Homesickness by Colin Barrett