In Colin Barrett’s 2024-novel , we follow three young people who are coming to terms with life’s unease in a small-town of Ireland. Nominated for the 2024 Booker Prize, the book establishes Barrett as one of the finest writers emerging from contemporary Ireland. Set in the North County, Mayo, the novel begins with Dev Hendricks lying on his couch with his dog as he waits for his friends to bring a kidnapped teenager.
As Dev takes stock of the situation—that there is a crime taking place in his house, drug business is involved, and his mother is dead leaving the house and her dog to him—he can only wish to escape it. On the other side of the town, there is Nicky, younger than Dev, who is confronted with the question of her future, and whether she’d leave for Dublin soon when the boy she is ‘going out with’ is kidnapped. Doll English submits to being kidnapped, but only wants to call his mother once because he knows how much she holds on to him ever since his brother and father left them alone.
With this suspenseful and haunting plot, we follow Dev, Nicky and Doll in a journey that will eventually upturn their lives for good. That Barrett is a stunning storyteller is certain. His short story collections have proven his penchant for writing sentences that land with an everlasting impact.
In , he employs a similar technique where his sentences are written to swallow the reader in the complex vortex of its characters. It makes use of descriptions to bring the reader .