Memphis Barker
Lives of Others
Young Skins
By Colin Barrett
Jonathan Cape 175pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
Leaving the Sea
By Ben Marcus
Granta Books 261pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
Things to Make and Break
By May-Lan Tan
CB editions 206pp £8.99 order from our bookshop
Colin Barrett’s debut collection, which last month won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, is a triumph. We are mostly in Glanbeigh, a decrepit Irish town whose elemental properties seem to be pebble dash, dried blood, lipstick and drink. But the final scenes take pleasure in shifting the ground beneath the reader, leaving him or her with one foot in a different place.
‘Stand Your Skin’ deposits us in the company of Bat, a withdrawn young man with hair down to his backside and a face that was once stove in by a thug’s kick. He comes home after a rare night out and passes his mother (‘old dear’) on the way to
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