Homesickness

Colin Barrett's Homesickness is his second book, following his debut Young Skins. That earlier collection won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, earned a place among the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 honorees, and collected several major literary awards. Critics compared its inventive use of language and its sharp portraits of working-class Ireland to the work of Faulkner, Hardy and Musil.

This new collection contains eight character-driven stories about people who never quite fit in: outsiders, misfits and malcontents whose lives stretch from County Mayo to Canada. Barrett's observant eye and darkly funny style run through every piece.

The stories range from a quiet evening in a local pub, interrupted by a fugitive waving a sword, to a funeral gathering where the dead refuse to stay buried, leaving the mourners balanced between this world and the next. After a shooting, a veteran policewoman is forced to question the emptiness of her everyday life. Elsewhere, an aspiring writer struggling with his father's cancer diagnosis lashes out in despair and throws his mentor's life into disarray.