"When you read City of Bohane, don’t expect to know what’s going on for the first twenty pages. Don’t give up! The vernacular of Bohane’s inhabitants begins to make sense if you stick with it. This is Ireland in the future, Gangs of New York in the 2050s. A gang called the Fancy rules the streets of this futuristic city. Particularly wonderful are the descriptions of the Alexander McQueen-esque outfits that the Fancy wear. There’s a love story in there and some major violence between gangs and Barry’s lyrical language makes it all seem so alive."
Publisher Graywolf Press
Publication Date 2013-06-04
Section New Titles - Paperback / Fiction / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Megan S.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9781555976453
Forty or so years in the future. The once-great city of Bohane on the west coast of Ireland is on its knees, infested by vice and split along tribal lines. There are the posh parts of town, but it is in the slums and backstreets of Smoketown, the tower blocks of the North Rises, and the eerie bogs of the Big Nothin’ that the city really lives.
For years it has all been under the control of Logan Hartnett, the dapper godfather of the Hartnett Fancy gang. But there’s trouble in the air. They say Hartnett’s old nemesis is back in town; his trusted henchmen are getting ambitious; and his missus wants him to give it all up and go straight. Kevin Barry’s City of Bohane combines Celtic myth and a Caribbean beat, fado and film, graphic-novel cool and all the ripe inheritance of Irish literature to create something hilarious, beautiful, and startlingly new.
