Kevin Barry’s forthcoming novel, Beatlebone, has been shortlisted for the £10,000 Goldsmiths Prize 2015, the winner of which will be announced on November 11.
Beatlebone is Barry's second novel following City of Bohane and the blurb from the publishers reads: "It is 1978, and John Lennon has escaped New York City to try to find the island off the west coast of Ireland he bought nine years prior.
"Leaving behind domesticity, his approaching forties, his inability to create, and his memories of his parents, he sets off to find calm in the comfortable silence of isolation. But when he puts himself in the hands of a shape-shifting driver full of Irish charm and dark whimsy, what ensues can only be termed a magical mystery tour."
The other works in contention for the Goldsmiths Prize are Max Porter’s Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, Magnus Mills’ The Field Of The Cloth Of Gold, Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island, Adam Thirlwell’s Lurid & Cute and Richard Beard’s Acts Of The Assassins.
Eimear McBride, the celebrated author of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, is one of the judges of this year's Goldsmiths award. McBride - herself a previous winner - has praised Barry’s novel, saying: "Beatlebone by Kevin Barry is a storm of a novel - unsettling and mesmerising. It’s formally interesting also, with the novelist choosing to step on and off the page."
Irvine Welsh has declared Barry to be “the most arresting and original writer to emerge from these islands in years.”
Josh Cohen is chair of the judging committee, while Jon McGregor and Leo Robson are the other judges.The Goldsmiths Prize is administered by Goldsmiths College, London in association with the New Statesman. Beatlebone will be published on October 29.
In 2013, the then inaugural Goldsmiths prize for “fiction at its most novel” went to McBride's novel, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. Over the course of nine years, McBride had been rejected by the principal publishing houses in Ireland and the UK before a small, Norwich-based press brought out her book.
