Kevin Barry Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Short Story Collections

Publication Order of Anthologies

Author Kevin Barry was born in Limerick in the year 1969 and lives in Dublin. He pens columns and sketches for the Irish Examiner in Cork and the Sunday Herald in Glasgow.

He spent much of his youth traveling, and lived at seventeen addresses by the time he was just 36 years old. He lived in places like Barcelona, Cork, Liverpool, and Santa Barbara before he settled in Sligo, buying and renovating a run-down Royal Irish Constabulary barracks. He settled down mainly because it was getting tougher to move large amounts of his books from one house to another.

While living in Cork, he worked as a freelance journalist, where he contributed a regular column to the Irish Examiner. In an effort to become an author, he bought a caravan and parked it in some field in West Cork, where he spent half a year penning what he called a “terrible novel”.

Kevin tried to just let loose while writing “City of Bohane”, in many ways, too. He only realized that it was going to set in the future while writing the first few chapters. It was liberating for him, as he could do whatever he wanted with it.

The place was invented, yet the language comes right from working class speech in the towns he grew up in, Cork and Limerick. These types of voices have never turned up in Irish literature before. Kevin tried getting the language down quickly, as he wanted it to be torrential. It took him only thirteen weeks or so to write the entire first draft, without a lot of eating or sleeping.

He feels that Morris and Charlie, the two main characters of “Night Boat to Tangier”, are big yappy characters that had been hanging around up inside his head for some time. He tried fitting them in a play and a story, but they just ruined both of them, since they are just so belligerent and big.

Kevin finds it very exciting when he is unable to get a total fix on his characters. Even after the release of the novel, he still wonders about Charlie and Morris. How much was big talk and how much was their personas? There is a lot of ambiguity from both of them, which he finds interesting. The two were vital characters to spend some time with, at times scarily so. While he was writing, they were right there in the room with him, pushing him. Sometimes in places he didn’t want to go.

Every single story he starts, he finishes. He finds it is out of some sort of professional pride. Kevin will even finish if he either knows or at least suspects a story is bad, feeling it is important to finish it and see what you have. He will then tuck it away in a drawer for about a few weeks, dust it off and look over what is there to find any hot spots.

He finds that about two of every ten stories he pens is good enough for him to ship out. It means that it would take him about five years between publications of his short story collections.

Kevin has written about literature and travel for The Sydney Morning Herald, The Guardian, and The Irish Times as well as many other publications.

“City of Bohane” won an International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for Best Novel in the year 2013. It was also nominated for a Costa Book Award for Best First Novel. “Beatlebone” was nominated for a James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for Best Book and a Goldsmiths Prize for Best Book. “Night Boat to Tangier” was nominated for Best Novel by The Man Booker Prize. Kevin was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in the year 2007.

Kevin writes science fiction and literary fiction. His debut novel, called “City of Bohane”, was released in the year 2011. Kevin has published books of short fiction.

“City of Bohane” is the first stand alone novel and was released in the year 2011. Forty years in the future. The formerly-great city of Bohane, located on the west coast of Ireland, is now on its knees and infested by vice, split along tribal lines. The posh parts of town still exist, but in the backstreets and the slums and the backstreets of Smoketown, the tower blocks of the Northside Rises and in the eerie bogs of Big Nothin’ that Bohane truly lives.

Logan Hartnett, the godfather of the Harnett Fancy gang, has held the city in his cool grip for many years. There is trouble in the air, though. They are saying his old rival has returned to Bohane, his wife wants him to give it up and go straight, and his henchmen have been getting ambitious, and then there is his mom.

“Beatlebone” is the second stand alone novel and was released in the year 2015. John will spend three days by himself on his island. This is all he asks, as he is many miles from love, now, as well as home. This is the tale of his oddest trip. John is the owner of a small island off of the coast of Ireland, and maybe here, he can finally outrun the shadows from his past.

This story of a wild journey into the world and the wild journey within, the novel is a mystery box of a read. The book is a portrait of an artist at a time of creative strife.

“Night Boat to Tangier” is the third stand alone novel and was released in the year 2019. In a dark waiting room of the ferry terminal in the shady Spanish port of Algeciras, two old Irishmen, Charlie Redmond and Maurice Hearne, who are longtime partners in the dangerous and lucrative enterprise smuggling drugs sit. It is night and they aren’t patient either. The date is October 23, 2018, and they expect Dilly, Maurice’s estranged daughter, to either be on a boat coming from Tangier, or head out on one heading there.

This nocturnal vigil is going to start a rather extraordinary journey back through time to excavate their shared history of mutual betrayals, serial exiles, violence, and romance.