That Old Country Music: Stories (PB) (2022)

All of Kevin Barry's prodigious gifts of language, character, and setting in these eleven exquisite stories transport the reader to an Ireland both timeless and recognizably modern. In this new collection, we encounter a gallery of west Ireland character poised on the cusp between hope and disaster: a forlorn and sensitive young man favoring art films and by no means setting the night on fire takes romantic aim at a mysterious Polish waitress in The Coast of Leitrim; a morbid town crier hounds the main drag of Limerick with the inevitable greeting Did you hear who died? in the drolly comic Who's-Dead McCarthy; and in the title story, a pregnant young woman waits anxiously in a van while her older fiancé undertakes, no doubt unwisely, robbing a petrol station with a claw hammer.

Shot through with dark humor and the uncanny power of the primal and unchanging Irish landscape, the stories in That Old Country Music represent some of the finest fiction.