Young Skins
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4.8 • 4 Ratings
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE 2014 GUARDIAN FIRST BOOK AWARD
'One of the best books of the past decade... The characters are edgy, often violent, locked into a world described in ways that are both harsh and tender. . . Adds a sense of myth, even a spiritual aura, to the narrative that lifts the meanness of the circumstances into some other realm' Colm Tóibín, Washington Post
*Winner of the 2014 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award
*Winner of the 2014 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature
This magnificent collection takes us to Glanbeigh, a small town in rural Ireland - a town in which the youth have the run of the place. Boy racers speed down the back lanes; couples haunt the midnight woods; young skins huddle in the cold once The Peacock has closed its doors. Here the young live hard and wear the scars. It matters whose sister you were seen with. If you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, it matters a very great deal.
Colin Barrett's debut does not take us to Glanbeigh alone; there are other towns, and older characters. But each story is defined by a youth lived in a crucible of menace and desire - and each crackles with the uniform energy and force that distinguish this terrific collection.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Barrett's accomplished debut collection, winner of the Guardian First Book Award and the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award in 2014, brims with young men affixed to bar stools with drained pint glasses, recalling tales of past failures over pub chatter. The stories' protagonists function on society's fringes as bouncers, washed-up musicians, cheap muscle yet all eschew the single dimension often reserved for such characters, instead speaking in voices both world-weary and wise, equally confident and lost. In "Stand Your Skin," a disfigured service-station employee attempts to return to his old haunts after he's invited to a coworker's going-away party, only to realize he can't slip into his former self. "Diamonds" finds a recovering alcoholic tempted to fall off the wagon by a new face at his AA meeting and her exotic stories of diamond mines. The centerpiece of the volume is a masterly novella, "Calm with Horses," that follows a thug nicknamed Arm while he navigates fatherhood and the anguish of his profession as the right-hand man to a local drug dealer. Moments of violence punctuate several of these stories, but the collection's true impact comes in the gifted prose of Barrett, which flourishes in poetic and spare scenes; he is an assured, powerful new literary voice.
