Captivating story-teller

Colin Barrett, a regular in the New Yorker, a prize-winning author of Young Skins, in 2013, introduces chronicler of small-town  County Mayo, in rural west Ireland with a serious prose style, brings eight stories, and takes us back to the barren backwaters of County Mayo, via Toronto, and illuminates the lives of outcasts, misfits, and malcontents with an eye for the abrupt and absurd. A sword-wielding fugitive signals the end of a quiet night in the neighbourhood pub. A funeral party teeters on the edge of this world and the next, like ghosts, won’t simply lay in wake. A shooting sees an everyday call-out lead a policewoman, to confront the banality of her own existence.

Tales of the village community, where people know their neighbours and their business. The remarkable Irish short story tradition imbues regional settings with rich significance with a regularity that differentiates Irish and British literary fiction.

 In “A Shooting in Rathreedane”, a police officer responds to a call from a man who has shot a trespasser on his land. After following careful instructions “to a farm with a yellow bungalow and a ‘92-reg Fiat motorhome up on bricks out the front”, she discovers she has known the injured man, who “possessed real criminal instincts but no real criminal talent”.

“The Ways” takes us through the point of view of three orphans, living in their family home with the vacuum of their parent’s absence.

 “ Whoever is There, Come on Through” is the saddest and strongest story in the book, with Eileen picking up her friend Murt after he has been released from his latest stay in hospital with depression. Eileen is busy trying to improve Murt’s life, while his brother  Jamie tells her “You care for him.. but you have no pity for him.” When the suicide attempt that has hung over the story happens, it is from an unexpected quarter and shocking.

Small town life is claustrophobic but can be redeemed through the community.

Home-sickness by Colin Barrett, Jonathan Cape £14.99, 224 pages.