adored this collection, one of the strongest I have read in recent memory. the stories feel effortless, yet are meticulously crafted and plotted, with characters and settings that leave a mark, which is a high task in the short form. barrett is one of the best doing it, and I can't wait to read more of his work.

There is such an insane amount of excellent writing coming out of Ireland, and even though not every single one of Barrett's short stories hit the mark for me, he is a fascinating writer with a recognizable voice. This collection consists of eight stories, mostly set in County Mayo, that stand out due to the knack for evocative details and the beautiful, atmospheric sentences. There is emotion shining through the rough dialogue, and humor even in the more dire tales about addiction and death. From time to time, Barrett drops dead-serious aphorisms on life and its inherent cruelty that can only be fought with mercy (look close enough, and there is some Catholicism to be discovered).

While I found myself skipping over some pages - the pacing is not always ideal, and some stories feature a bunch of unnecessary characters -, the parts that grabbed me where outstandingly effective. I particularly enjoyed how the author, who often focuses on struggling male figures (themes include death of parents, alcoholism, writing as a career, depression, loneliness, lack of direction, sibling relationships), combines gloomy outlooks and events with the weird: A desperate, aspiring poet who earns his money by drawing perverted comic fan art on request? A night at the local pub where someone brings a katana? Yes, please. I know Barrett specializes in the short form, but I love to read a novel crafted by him. Astute observations, sharp, punchy writing, great stuff.

Eight exquiiiiisite stories. I kept getting hung up on how good the dialogue was - this is writing that is wonderful, warm storytelling while you’re immersed in it but also really dazzling when held up to the light and studied. I don’t really know how to describe it but this is the kind of writing that makes me just really love people? Just in general? Highlights were “The Silver Coast” (a surprisingly complex story of a woman at a funeral for an acquaintance at best), “The Low Shimmering Black Drone” (to date the only fiction that features COVID in its reality that I’ve unequivocally loved), “The Alps” (a story that bravely asks “what if there were some guys, and those guys were weird, and then another guy showed up at a bar with a sword”), “Anhedonia, Here I Come” (I’m realizing I’m starting to list all the stories and am therefore cutting myself off)… What a perfect collection.

Equally as good as young skins his prior book of short stories. Brilliant both. Colin Barrett and Kevin Barry are 2 of the greatest short story writers that have ever been. They make you glad to be alive. They are diamonds in a sea of rocks.

See my review at: https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/20023-beguiling-tales-county-mayo-colin-barrett-s-homesickness

To me, this book started slow, then seized me in its grasp. I always have a bit of trouble getting used to Irish accents and dialect in books, but that's my own fault. The language — AHH — the diction!! I felt like a high schooler again obsessively underlining everything. Just absolutely gorgeous.

The characters were moving and emphatic. I kept thinking the stories were older than they were because they were just so timeless. I felt for the good ones and the bad ones and I shed a single tear over every description. You'll be reading about something having crazy thoughts and then suddenly Barrett drops in the most gorgeous words you could ever use to talk about the sky. Wow. I loved it, loved how quick it was too — it made me want to go back and linger.

I tend to approach short stories with skepticism, for all the hyperbolic praise people heap on the form and the preemptive efforts to prove that they can be "just as good" as novels. Every once in a while, though, I am reminded that those arguments need not be made when the stories themselves render any counter position invalid. Great characters, prose unlike any you'll find anywhere else, a particular kind of humour borne of attention to life's madnesses.

Special thanks to Grove Atlantic and Netgalley for my own opinion of this ARC.

Yes! Yes! Yes! This is what a short story book is all about. I love, love, loved it. Read the blurb. Its just great! What a gift for characters. Unequivocally 5 stars!

Colin Barrett’s new collection, Homesickness, has all the fascination, edginess and laid-back humour of his first collection, Young Skins, and more - The 10, e.g., is like a little novel.

His is not the world of gentility and politeness or flabbiness and procrastination - it’s life in all it’s rawness.

Thank you to NetGalley and to Grove Press for this eARC.

This collection will probably appeal a lot more to people with local knowledge, but it’s still an evocative, quick and pleasant enough read.

There are eight stories, many of which begin in media res and end without real resolution, so that each feels like a quick study, a snapshot of different lives. I found this rather less than satisfying—perhaps everyone’s quibble with the short story format—and it brought down my rating of the collection. I did like that the characters are ordinary people, people like me, that these are stories about working class lives. My favourite story was the one about the guy who walks into a bar with a sword.

CW for suicide, death.

Rated: 6/10

I so enjoyed these stories. I guess comparisons to Kevin Barry are inevitable, as Colin Barrett writes with the same violence and urgency and somehow weaves in humour.

“That’s the thing about Mayo. I find it’s very presentable from a distance. It’s only up close it lets you down.”-- Crean in “A Shooting in Rathreedane” / “Homesickness: Stories.”

Colin Barrett is one of the finest short story writers active today. His first collection, “Young Skins”, won universal praise and there has been much anticipation surrounding “Homesickness: Stories.” Most of the tales here originate where Barrett grew up, Ireland’s County Mayo, and a few come from his current home in Toronto– a clue to the “Homesickness” title.

We encounter eight stories with authentic characters, most of whom are struggling in some way. Some are merely stuck in ruts, some are dejected, and there are even a few bargaining with suicide. Jackie Noonan is a Guard in “A Shooting in Rathreedane” who has, on the surface at least, reconciled herself with taking orders from Crean, a male of the same rank– but a male, after all, so that’s that. In “The Ways” we come across an orphaned family– youngsters with no idea how to handle what life has crashed down upon them. Gerry, the youngest one, is consumed with anger issues and escapes to his video game where he “blew everything away that moved.” The story ends with the game repeatedly posing the question “Do you wish to continue?”

These passages do not finish with slamming, life altering conclusions, no neatly tied packages. What we see are scenes of working class people struggling to make due with lives not turning out as planned. There is often an acceptance of things which can not change and a lot of a “what’cha gonna do?” attitude.

It would be an awful disservice if I am painting this as a depressing, doom and gloom book. Throughout we see these characters handling the absurdities of their condition with wit and humor. These are very real, for the most part very likable people and Colin Barrett’s writing keeps us pulling affectionately for them. It is not hard to understand the “Homesickness” for Mayo the author feels.

Thank you to Grove/Atlantic, NetGalley, and Colin Barrett for the advance reader copy in exchange for an honest review. This was a wonderful reading experience… each time I read it.

“The world is full of unaccountable things, if you’re keeping track…And who keeps track?”--"The Silver Coast" / “Homesickness: Stories.”

I was not previously familiar with the work of Colin Barrett, but I thoroughly enjoyed HOMESICKNESS. This is a beautiful and well-crafted collection. What strikes me the most is the veracity with which Barrett renders his characters. We, as readers, are dropped into their lives.

As with many lauded short story writers, Barrett focuses on human foibles and the small genuine moments that make up a life. Readers looking for a clearly delineated message or billboard-type theme may be disappointed, but I would like to suggest that Barrett's writing style is supremely elegant and moving, far more so than if the author had chosen to preach to us.

Highly recommended for fans of literary fiction.

3.5 rounded up

Colin Barrett's debut Young Skins received a lot of praise from GR reviewers whose views I trust, so I was excited to dive into his sophomore collection. It took me a little while to get into the swing of the wring style, but there is some exceedingly good writing in here. I think where I struggled with Homesickness is that often the stories have slightly ambiguous endings or lack conclusion, and in some cases I wanted a bit more pretext. On reflection (and after reading quite a few other reviews online) I appreciate that this is definitely more just my personal preference and that Barrett is a talent to watch. Readers who enjoyed Pure Gold: Stories and Kevin Barry will definitely find something to enjoy here.

No one writes in English like the Irish. I can never remember a time when I wasn't knocked out by the gift for story, the lyricism, the economy, the music and metaphor that writers from Ireland seem to possess as if by divine endowment. Colin Barrett shares in that heritage. This is only his second book but his ear is so precise, so devoid of sentimentality, that it sounds like he's been at this kind of storytelling for ages. The current set of 8 short stories differ from the visceral wallop of his first collection (Young Skins), operating at a more understated timbre. These provide such a fluid read that you're likely obligated to give the whole thing a second go to make sure you didn't miss anything. Anyway, I took it twice and without regret for a second dose of the homely, human ache for connection that sounds here.

Based on the short story collections that I've read, what I've to come to expect from a typical short story is a discrete narrative, a kind of novel in miniature. That is to say, most of the short stories I've encountered have been more or less like polished gems, very much self-contained in their little short-story packages. Where such stories are polished gems, though, Barrett's are like rocks chipped out of some surface, rough and jagged and imperfect in the way that all organic things are. They're stories that feel ongoing rather than discrete, not always going where you expect them to, and not always giving you what you want, either. In Barrett's hands, though, that's not at all a drawback.

Barrett's stories are not really interested in giving you a nice, clean narrative with a delineated beginning, middle, and end, but rather in dropping you into the lives of their characters and seeing what happens. In "The Ways," three siblings who have recently lost both their parents to cancer go about their lives; in "Anhedonia, Here I Come," a struggling poet mired in his work attempts to deal with his various frustrations over it; in "The Alps," the patrons of a club encounter a young man who walks in with a sword. They're stories that, for the most part, don't have any flashy or grandiose moments--in fact a lot of them actively lean towards the mundane--but in every one of them there is a tautness, a dramatic tension that holds the story upright and keeps you wanting to keep reading.

Unlike the typical short story I'm used to reading, Barrett's don't all end with a moment that clinches the point of the story, or come with some kind of critical passage that's the key to unlocking the thematic focus of the story. That's not to say that these stories are pointless, or that they're devoid of any important moments--because of course they have a point, and of course they have important moments; it's just that those are all woven into the various circumstances that these characters find themselves in.

And let me just say, these stories are so propulsive, so intensely readable. I think a big part of this is because they're very much built around narratives where things happen: people go places, do things, meet other people, talk to them, etc. Characters think about things, but they also do things, and the "doing" part is what really spurs the "thinking" part of these stories on. (I don't know how to describe this in a way that doesn't sound trite--don't literally all stories feature people thinking and doing things?--but IT'S TRUE, OKAY.)

It would be impossible to review this collection without talking about Barrett's writing, because it's just stellar. Colin Barrett's writing feels like a photo with the contrast turned up: everything stark and punchy and evocative. It's so sensorily rich, all the details just pop.

Barrett is funny, too, and his sense of humour comes through in a lot of these stories. Sometimes the humour comes in the form of wry or witty comments, sometimes in the form of cutting comebacks (sibling dynamics in particular are so well-portrayed here). "The Alps" actually made me laugh out loud at one point, so absurd and absolutely wild it was but still surprisingly moving.

Favourite short story is easily "The Ways." Other favourites include "The Alps," "The Low, Shimmering Black Drone," and "Anhedonia, Here I Come." I liked all the other ones, too; the only story that I didn't really get was "The Silver Coast," though I feel like it would definitely benefit from a reread.

As you've probably gathered already, this was a different kind of short story collection than I'm used to reading, but I absolutely loved it.

Thank you so much to Grove Atlantic for providing me with an e-ARC of this via NetGalley!