Beatlebone
Kevin Barry
“He is so many miles from love now and home. This is the story of his strangest trip”
Available as Paperback, eBook, Downloadable audio
Winner of the Goldsmiths prize and shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year
WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE IRISH BOOK AWARDS
“John is so many miles from love now and home. This is the story of his strangest trip.”
A novel of family, ghosts, love, music and the quest for truth, Beatlebone recounts a wild journey through the west of Ireland in 1978. At its helm is John, a maddened genius fleeing fame and seeking peace. With his deadpan Irish driver, Cornelius, at his side, John is hellbent on reaching the Island of Dorinish, an assignment he arranged ten years before.
Lyrical, freewheeling, quixotic and fun, Beatlebone is a sad and beautiful comedy.
“Books like this come along once in a generation”
new York Times
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“Superb … Beatlebone is a novel of necessary invention: profound, funny, hard to pin down”
irish Times
“Casually lyrical, formally inventive, funny and moving, it is a small wonder”
sunday Times
“Gloriously freewheeling … a tale of fame, freaks, bad liquor and bad weather”
guardian
”Beatlebone is a rule-breaking novel, a strange and fascinating look at the mystery of creative inspiration”
financial Times
Kevin Barry
Kevin Barry is the author of the novels Beatlebone, City of Bohane and Night Boat to Tangier and the story collections Dark Lies the Island and There Are Little Kingdoms. His awards include the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Prize and the Lannan Foundation Literary Award. His stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta and elsewhere. He also works as a playwright and screenwriter, and he lives in County Sligo, Ireland. In 2019, Night Boat to Tangier was longlisted for the Booker Prize.
Kevin Barry’s Beatlebone, triumphant at the 2015 Goldsmiths Prize!
‘As Barry follows John’s strange journey, the boundaries between fact and fiction, author and subject, past and present morph. Dark, trippy and comic, Beatlebone is a heady exploration of creativity and identity’
Francesca Wade
The Telegraph
‘If the novel loses innovation it’s f****d’: Beatlebone wins the 2015 Goldsmiths Prize.
Goldsmiths Prize
gold.ac.uk
Kevin Barry narrates this short video for his Goldsmiths-winning novel Beatlebone.
‘Books like this come along once in a generation … It all hangs together perfectly to form the kind of next-level literature that inspires, even incites another generation of natural-born wordsmiths to write big and bold and put in the work it takes to become a beast.’
Steve Earle
The New York Times
