A Year in Reading: Kevin Barry

The world stalls, and then sweeps into chaos, and then it gathers again – we emerge from 2020 woozily, as though from a dark weird dream, grateful, I suppose, that we’re still going at all, grateful that we can turn our thoughts, just for a few moments here in the dank and drear mid-winter, to the books that have sustained us.

I was grateful to for many months of such hallucinogenic clarity, such haunting presence. In , he is quite simply back with us, and while this book may be a little looser and messier than its two predecessors, it’s still more poignant and funnier and more beautifully written than almost anything else of the era.