Review
`**** I can see the film already. If it's a patch on the book, it'll be a cracker' --RTE Guide
`This is a startlingly and imaginative debut novel from one of Ireland's most talented new writers' --Irish Post
`Cool, culty and futuristic novel set in a crime-ravaged Irish city and starring a crime lord beset by threats to his power. A book that has language all of its own' --Waterstone's Books Quarterly
`Kevin Barry's Bohane is a thoroughly well-realised cartoon world. Or graphic novel world, with pictures you create for yourself using the generous array of material Barry puts at your disposal ... Plots and characters from Mad Max and Gangs of New York , and the story songs of Bob Dylan and Tom Waits; atmosphere from Sergio Leone and Tarantino and Jack Yeats paintings. Mechanics from The Wire and Cormac McCarthy. Swagger from showband dance halls ...Beautiful, arresting, precise ... a compelling creation' --Irish Times, Keith Ridgway
`City of Bohane is a book fizzing with energy, juiced up on the possibilities of language and replete with a plot that, as Barry admits, could have come straight from John Ford...It's the language - the spark of the dialogue, the metallic flash and glitter of the novel's voice, the pleasure of its patois - that I'm hooked by' --Glasgow Herald, Interview with Teddy Jamieson
`A grotesquely comedic gothic romp'
--Irish Sunday Times, Interview with Ed Power
`...he makes a bold statement, not only about his considerable talent but also his plot to upend the realm of modern Irish literature with a work of such singular scope and voice that it is bound to be the talk of book circles this year and possibly beyond. His language is startling, somehow a physical presence. It coils and releases itself or grooves hypnotically before breaking into a frantic spasm of description and dialogue. The gears in your brain are being shifted around and you're enjoying the feeling. It will go on to teach valuable lessons to Barry's successors, reminding them of the places the written word can bring you to... Those people who harbor ambitions to write a book are usually made to reassess things when writers like Kevin Barry pop up on the radar. As of this book's publication, he is a game-changer, someone who will perch annoyingly at the back of the minds of Irish literature's up-and-comers whispering "must try harder"' --Sunday Independent, 15 May 2011, Hilary A White
`...Barry's characters use a rich, profane slang that invigorates his prose...' --The Irish News, May 2011
`Kevin Barry is a great storyteller, and the twists and turns of City of Bohane are satisfying...one of the most intriguing things about City of Bohane - and Barry underplays this beautifully - is its lack of technology...Barry's vernacular, like his plot, is a wonderful blend of past, present and imagined future...sometimes the words are doing backflips and spinning on their heads. Sometimes they are just watching...that Barry has control over all these registers, and makes them his own, is quite astonishing. This debut marks him out as a writer of great promise' --Saturday Guardian, 14 May 2011, Scarlett Thomas
'The narrative voice is clipped and chummy, and makes use of apt tropes... The novel's principal act of betrayal is well disguised and expertly revealed.' --TLS, Mark Kamine
`The book unfolds like a film with bursts of violence, surreal conversation and beautifully woven descriptions of a city lost in the clutches of vice and violence, and builds into a multi-stranded epic gang war in the great tradition of films Scorsese himself would be proud of.' --Booktrust
'Volatile prose, text-speak and Irish coinages add to the success of this zingy debut novel.' --Sunday Times Culture
`Part crime/gangster succession saga, part nostalgic ballad, part love-story and part homage to the beauty and elasticity of the English language, City of Bohane is a hard one to describe- but that's what makes it so exhilarating to read...This isn't a place where you'd want to wash up-but it is the stuff of brilliant literature... Barry's real genius is in his reinvention of language- the way he's taken the already distinctive Irish aural vernacular and twisted it- wrapped it around a jazzy riff and made it his own. It's foul-mouthed and brutal elegiac... Linguistically innovative, somewhat challenging and definitely different from, anything else doing the rounds this spring.' --Bookmunch
`The plot is engrossing, with strong bones, yet sinuous and surprising. Logan, Gant and Macu are fantastic. Technicolour and loud, and so well drawn that their reality becomes yours... Barry plays with words with a manic joy and it's this use of language that draws the reader in. For his new world he coins a new slag so believable you can roll it around your tongue.'
--Timeout
'Addictive first novel... this slangy, plosive-packed prose is what makes the book a success...an expert manipulation of syntax keeps things zingy... it is a plus point that the dystopia bears no allegorical weight, thriving purely as an imaginary realm to be taken at face value.' --Sunday Times
`This is a darkly funny tale of gangland warfare in Ireland that reads like a fast-paced film.' --Cosmopolitan
`It's hilarious and visceral.'
--Financial Times
`City of Bohane is the exuberant, spine-tinglingly atmospheric creation of Limerick-born Kevin Barry, whose first foray into novels has been eagerly awaited by fans of his award-winning short stories... This hyper-real world stuffed with overblown violence and all manner of cartoon-like grotesques is certainly a highly entertaining place to lose yourself in.' --Metro
`Barry recalls not only Joyce and Miller but Anthony Burgess, Brett Easton Ellis and even Dylan Thomas too. All of these influences in no way overshadow Barry's unique voice which is inventive, exhilarating and entirely sustained throughout this riot of a novel. He has created a location and characters as vivid as in Thomas's Milk Wood, an idiomatic language as realised as Burgess' nadsat in A Clockwork Orange and writes with the purpose and poetry that Irish writers seem to be born with... the dialogue is hilarious, the descriptions fantastically rich and the overall effect completely immersive... I enjoyed every single second I spent in Bohane and might just have picked up a bit of the taint whilst I was there, y'check me?' --Just William's Luck
'Exhilarating new work... this novel confirms the arrival of a fresh and original voice in Irish literature... Although the book has a compelling narrative flow, its primary delight is the freshness and vitality of language - especially the relentlessly colourful dialogue... [A]hugely entertaining and original novel.' --Irish Sunday Times
`The prose is sizzling, its molecules rocked by the force of collision...[Kevin Barry is an] outrageously talented author... The power of the writing - of the writer's imagination - is the siren call that hooks you... It stuns you with its daring...but it works.'
--The Scotsman
`His inventiveness with language, organic sense of humour and reality fuse together to make for a near-brilliant first novel' --Platform
'Barry's characters use a rich, profane slang that invigorates his prose.' --Norwich Evening News
`So it is (perhaps a little perversely) a genuine surprise when a debut as brashly hailed as City of Bohane is as impressive as it's promised to be...Barry is a writer of considerable comic and stylistic gifts. His novel is a work of pure and unrestrained imagination, both in its linguistic resourcefulness and its vivid depiction of a small, crime-ridden west of Ireland city...a wild vision of comic-book lawlessness...Barry's rich and wholly convincing patois is one-part film noir tough talk, one-part contemporary Limerick vernacular and several parts sheer exuberant invention. Barry is firmly in possession of his own distinct voice...its violence and shallowness are a major part of its queasy appeal.'
--Sunday Business Post (Eire)
`Barry's characters use a rich, profane slang that invigorates his prose.' --Norwich Evening News
`So it is (perhaps a little perversely) a genuine surprise when a debut as brashly hailed as City of Bohane is as impressive as it's promised to be...Barry is a writer of considerable comic and stylistic gifts. His novel is a work of pure and unrestrained imagination, both in its linguistic resourcefulness and its vivid depiction of a small, crime-ridden west of Ireland city...a wild vision of comic-book lawlessness...Barry's rich and wholly convincing patois is one-part film noir tough talk, one-part contemporary Limerick vernacular and several parts sheer exuberant invention. Barry is firmly in possession of his own distinct voice...its violence and shallowness are a major part of its queasy appeal.' --Sunday Business Post (Eire)
'a zingy debut that owes much of its success to its volatile prose, text-speak and Irish coinages.' --The Sunday Times
`This is a startlingly and imaginative debut novel from one of Ireland's most talented new writers' --Irish Post
`Cool, culty and futuristic novel set in a crime-ravaged Irish city and starring a crime lord beset by threats to his power. A book that has language all of its own' --Waterstone's Books Quarterly
`Kevin Barry's Bohane is a thoroughly well-realised cartoon world. Or graphic novel world, with pictures you create for yourself using the generous array of material Barry puts at your disposal ... Plots and characters from Mad Max and Gangs of New York , and the story songs of Bob Dylan and Tom Waits; atmosphere from Sergio Leone and Tarantino and Jack Yeats paintings. Mechanics from The Wire and Cormac McCarthy. Swagger from showband dance halls ...Beautiful, arresting, precise ... a compelling creation' --Irish Times, Keith Ridgway
`City of Bohane is a book fizzing with energy, juiced up on the possibilities of language and replete with a plot that, as Barry admits, could have come straight from John Ford...It's the language - the spark of the dialogue, the metallic flash and glitter of the novel's voice, the pleasure of its patois - that I'm hooked by' --Glasgow Herald, Interview with Teddy Jamieson
`A grotesquely comedic gothic romp'
--Irish Sunday Times, Interview with Ed Power
`...he makes a bold statement, not only about his considerable talent but also his plot to upend the realm of modern Irish literature with a work of such singular scope and voice that it is bound to be the talk of book circles this year and possibly beyond. His language is startling, somehow a physical presence. It coils and releases itself or grooves hypnotically before breaking into a frantic spasm of description and dialogue. The gears in your brain are being shifted around and you're enjoying the feeling. It will go on to teach valuable lessons to Barry's successors, reminding them of the places the written word can bring you to... Those people who harbor ambitions to write a book are usually made to reassess things when writers like Kevin Barry pop up on the radar. As of this book's publication, he is a game-changer, someone who will perch annoyingly at the back of the minds of Irish literature's up-and-comers whispering "must try harder"' --Sunday Independent, 15 May 2011, Hilary A White
`...Barry's characters use a rich, profane slang that invigorates his prose...' --The Irish News, May 2011
`Kevin Barry is a great storyteller, and the twists and turns of City of Bohane are satisfying...one of the most intriguing things about City of Bohane - and Barry underplays this beautifully - is its lack of technology...Barry's vernacular, like his plot, is a wonderful blend of past, present and imagined future...sometimes the words are doing backflips and spinning on their heads. Sometimes they are just watching...that Barry has control over all these registers, and makes them his own, is quite astonishing. This debut marks him out as a writer of great promise' --Saturday Guardian, 14 May 2011, Scarlett Thomas
'The narrative voice is clipped and chummy, and makes use of apt tropes... The novel's principal act of betrayal is well disguised and expertly revealed.' --TLS, Mark Kamine
`The book unfolds like a film with bursts of violence, surreal conversation and beautifully woven descriptions of a city lost in the clutches of vice and violence, and builds into a multi-stranded epic gang war in the great tradition of films Scorsese himself would be proud of.' --Booktrust
'Volatile prose, text-speak and Irish coinages add to the success of this zingy debut novel.' --Sunday Times Culture
`Part crime/gangster succession saga, part nostalgic ballad, part love-story and part homage to the beauty and elasticity of the English language, City of Bohane is a hard one to describe- but that's what makes it so exhilarating to read...This isn't a place where you'd want to wash up-but it is the stuff of brilliant literature... Barry's real genius is in his reinvention of language- the way he's taken the already distinctive Irish aural vernacular and twisted it- wrapped it around a jazzy riff and made it his own. It's foul-mouthed and brutal elegiac... Linguistically innovative, somewhat challenging and definitely different from, anything else doing the rounds this spring.' --Bookmunch
`The plot is engrossing, with strong bones, yet sinuous and surprising. Logan, Gant and Macu are fantastic. Technicolour and loud, and so well drawn that their reality becomes yours... Barry plays with words with a manic joy and it's this use of language that draws the reader in. For his new world he coins a new slag so believable you can roll it around your tongue.'
--Timeout
'Addictive first novel... this slangy, plosive-packed prose is what makes the book a success...an expert manipulation of syntax keeps things zingy... it is a plus point that the dystopia bears no allegorical weight, thriving purely as an imaginary realm to be taken at face value.' --Sunday Times
`This is a darkly funny tale of gangland warfare in Ireland that reads like a fast-paced film.' --Cosmopolitan
`It's hilarious and visceral.'
--Financial Times
`City of Bohane is the exuberant, spine-tinglingly atmospheric creation of Limerick-born Kevin Barry, whose first foray into novels has been eagerly awaited by fans of his award-winning short stories... This hyper-real world stuffed with overblown violence and all manner of cartoon-like grotesques is certainly a highly entertaining place to lose yourself in.' --Metro
`Barry recalls not only Joyce and Miller but Anthony Burgess, Brett Easton Ellis and even Dylan Thomas too. All of these influences in no way overshadow Barry's unique voice which is inventive, exhilarating and entirely sustained throughout this riot of a novel. He has created a location and characters as vivid as in Thomas's Milk Wood, an idiomatic language as realised as Burgess' nadsat in A Clockwork Orange and writes with the purpose and poetry that Irish writers seem to be born with... the dialogue is hilarious, the descriptions fantastically rich and the overall effect completely immersive... I enjoyed every single second I spent in Bohane and might just have picked up a bit of the taint whilst I was there, y'check me?' --Just William's Luck
'Exhilarating new work... this novel confirms the arrival of a fresh and original voice in Irish literature... Although the book has a compelling narrative flow, its primary delight is the freshness and vitality of language - especially the relentlessly colourful dialogue... [A]hugely entertaining and original novel.' --Irish Sunday Times
`The prose is sizzling, its molecules rocked by the force of collision...[Kevin Barry is an] outrageously talented author... The power of the writing - of the writer's imagination - is the siren call that hooks you... It stuns you with its daring...but it works.'
--The Scotsman
`His inventiveness with language, organic sense of humour and reality fuse together to make for a near-brilliant first novel' --Platform
'Barry's characters use a rich, profane slang that invigorates his prose.' --Norwich Evening News
`So it is (perhaps a little perversely) a genuine surprise when a debut as brashly hailed as City of Bohane is as impressive as it's promised to be...Barry is a writer of considerable comic and stylistic gifts. His novel is a work of pure and unrestrained imagination, both in its linguistic resourcefulness and its vivid depiction of a small, crime-ridden west of Ireland city...a wild vision of comic-book lawlessness...Barry's rich and wholly convincing patois is one-part film noir tough talk, one-part contemporary Limerick vernacular and several parts sheer exuberant invention. Barry is firmly in possession of his own distinct voice...its violence and shallowness are a major part of its queasy appeal.'
--Sunday Business Post (Eire)
`Barry's characters use a rich, profane slang that invigorates his prose.' --Norwich Evening News
`So it is (perhaps a little perversely) a genuine surprise when a debut as brashly hailed as City of Bohane is as impressive as it's promised to be...Barry is a writer of considerable comic and stylistic gifts. His novel is a work of pure and unrestrained imagination, both in its linguistic resourcefulness and its vivid depiction of a small, crime-ridden west of Ireland city...a wild vision of comic-book lawlessness...Barry's rich and wholly convincing patois is one-part film noir tough talk, one-part contemporary Limerick vernacular and several parts sheer exuberant invention. Barry is firmly in possession of his own distinct voice...its violence and shallowness are a major part of its queasy appeal.' --Sunday Business Post (Eire)
'a zingy debut that owes much of its success to its volatile prose, text-speak and Irish coinages.' --The Sunday Times
Book Description
This is the cool, comic, violent and lyrical debut novel from one of Ireland's most talented new writers.
Product Description
Shortlisted for the 2011 Costa First Novel Award
Forty years in the future. The once-great city of Bohane on the west coast of Ireland is on its knees, infested by vice and split along tribal lines. There are the 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, the city has been in the cool grip of Logan Hartnett, the dapper godfather of the Hartnett Fancy gang. But there's trouble in the air. They say his old nemesis is back in town; his trusted henchmen are getting ambitious; and his missus wants him to give it all up and go straight... And then there's his mother.
City of Bohane is a visionary novel that blends influences from film and the graphic novel, from Trojan beats and calypso rhythms, from Celtic myth and legend, from fado and the sagas, and from all the great inheritance of Irish literature. A work of mesmerising imagination and vaulting linguistic invention, it is a taste of the glorious and new.
From the Back Cover
''The most arresting and original writer to emerge from these isalnds in years. He's destined to be a true literary star.' Irvine Welsh
'Sweet Baba Jay, what an unforgettably wonderful novel: hilarious, unique, utterly believable. It's Joyce meets Anthony Burgess, and as funny as Flann O'Brien. We Kevin Barry fans have known for a while that he is a writer of rarest gifts, but this book is a startling masterpiece.' Joseph O'Connor
'Kevin Barry is unique, a one-man school. His work is hilarious and unpredictable - and always brilliant.' Roddy Doyle
'Kevin Barry is the real thing, and nothing can stop him.' David Guterson
About the Author
Kevin Barry's story collection, There Are Little Kingdoms, won the Rooney Prize in 2007. His short fiction has appeared widely on both sides of the Atlantic, most recently in The New Yorker.
