‘The Silver Coast’ by Colin Barrett

I once had a dream where I was playing in goal for Liverpool and pinged a long ball over the top of Leicester’s midfield for Colin to bring down and jink past Dewsbury-Hall, to secure an 88th-minute 3-2 winner. My exultant yell woke my family. This has nothing to do with the story. However, his work does bring me a similar, if less weird, form of joy. This story is all shimmer and disquiet, and sad, smoke-touched beauty.

First published in Homesickness, Grove/Jonathan Cape, 2022. You can read an extract from the story at Harper’s, here, and hear Eileen Walsh read it on RTE here

‘The Clancy Kid’ by Colin Barrett

I haven’t read all that many stories in the past few years, as part of an effort to stop writing them (long-story, for another time). As a result, I had Colin Barrett’s Young Skins sitting on my shelves for ages before getting round to it a few weeks ago. I could choose one of several stories but The Clancy Kid is the first in the book, the one I read first, and so the impression of it’s low key brilliance has stuck with me the most. There is very little to it. Two friends drink in a pub. They leave, turn over a car, and meet some kids on a bridge. There is an unresolved affair, a preoccupation with a child that has gone missing in the next town, an almost randomly collected bunch of things. And yet it is so beautifully done, so unforced, so life-like, that it takes your breath away.

First published in Young Skins (Cape, 2014)