City of Bohane
“Extraordinary . . . Barry takes us on a roaring journey . . . Powerful, exuberant fiction.” —The New York Times Book Review (front cover)Forty or so 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....
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“Extraordinary . . . Barry takes us on a roaring journey . . . Powerful, exuberant fiction.” —The New York Times Book Review (front cover)Forty or so 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 North Rises, and the eerie bogs of the Big Nothin’ that the city really lives. For years it has all been under the control of Logan Hartnett, the dapper godfather of the Hartnett Fancy gang. But there’s trouble in the air. They say Hartnett’s 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. Kevin Barry’s City of Bohane combines Celtic myth and a Caribbean beat, fado and film, graphic-novel cool and all the ripe inheritance of Irish literature to create something hilarious, beautiful, and startlingly new.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9781555976453 (155597645X)
Publish date: June 4th 2013
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Pages no: 288
Edition language: English
Category:
Fantasy,
Novels,
Science Fiction,
Literature,
European Literature,
Cultural,
Book Club,
Literary Fiction,
Irish Literature,
Mystery,
Ireland,
Crime,
Dystopia
bookshelves: one-penny-wonder, paper-read, impac-winner, britain-ireland, amusing, teh-brillianz, spring-2014 Read from December 05, 2013 to April 13, 2014 This is his first novel; Barry has previously written short fiction and his collection 'There Are Little Kingdoms' won the Rooney Prize in 2...
This book was a challenge, but in a good way. It's set 40 years in the future, in a fictitious city in the west of Ireland. (In the interest of full disclosure: I lived in Galway, a real city in the west of Ireland, for three years, so I'm a bit biased toward the country and the region.) The charact...
Got as far as page 102 and realised that I was just skimming and not really reading and what's more I didn't care if every character died on the spot. Stopped reading. Joseph O'Connor on the back talks about it being "Joyce meets Anthony Burgess and as funny as Flann O'Brien"; Irvine Welsh says "H...
To read Kevin Barry's "City of Bohane" is to experience a verbal cross of Joyce and Burgess, with perhaps a bit of Russell Hoban's "RIdley Walker" in the background. Joyce of course is no surprise -- this is Irish writing, after all -- and I am referring to the "Clockwork Orange" style of Anthony Bu...
wait for the price to drop:O)IMPAC Winner 2013: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-22795515