Beatlebone cover art

Beatlebone

 Preview

Get 30 days of Standard free

£5.99/mo after trial. Cancel monthly.
Try for £0.00
More purchase options

Beatlebone

By: Kevin Barry
Narrated by: Kevin Barry
Try for £0.00

£5.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for £12.22

Buy Now for £12.22

WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE IRISH BOOK AWARDS 2015

He will spend three days alone on his island. That is all that he asks . . . John is so many miles from love now and home. This is the story of his strangest trip.

John owns a tiny island off the west coast of Ireland. Maybe it is there that he can at last outrun the shadows of his past.

The tale of a wild journey into the world and a wild journey within, Beatlebone is a mystery box of a novel. It's a portrait of an artist at a time of creative strife. It is most of all a sad and beautiful comedy from one of the most gifted stylists now at work.

©2015 Canongate Books Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1

Critic reviews

"Casually lyrical, formally inventive, funny and moving, it is a small wonder"
"Gloriously freewheeling . . . a tale of fame, freaks, bad liquor and bad weather"
"Books like this come along once in a generation"
"Beatlebone is as gloriously confounding and as wondrously welcome as a hatching hawk's egg in a Christmas cracker"
"The most arresting and original writer to emerge from these islands in years" (IRVINE WELSH)
"Beatlebone is a rule-breaking novel, a strange and fascinating look at the mystery of creative inspiration"
"A strange and brilliant experiment into showing your working. It's thematically dense yet supremely readable"
"

I think Kevin Barry is two kinds, if not three kinds, of a genius . . . wonderful storytelling . . . enormously cinematic

" (TOM SUTCLIFFE)
"Superb . . . Beatlebone is a novel of necessary invention: profound, funny, hard to pin down"
"Mingling surreal black humour and breakdown, Beatlebone is a wild cascade of language and imagery, rich in wordplay and referential resonance. Beneath the glittering surface Barry is giving us a vanitas on fame and celebrity. Remember the date is 1978. The real-life endgame will be played out very soon"
"As ever with Barry, the dialogue is a joy, tappi9ng into a rich vein of humorous melancholy . . . this is a sharp, likeable book that moves deftly between warm comedy and a grimmer concern with Lennon's parentless childhood with the 'dead love stories' that 'make us'"
"A profound, mad and intriguing novel. Too often novels about great artists shy away from attending to those very creative processes that made them great. Beatlebone is a committed, brutal portrait"
"The kind of next-level literature that inspires, even incites another generation of natural-born wordsmiths to write big and bold"
"There's music to Barry's prose: Smart rhythms dart through his sentences; taut bridges join his paragraphs; the tinge of hysteria serves to animate his characters and their surroundings. His dialogue is whimsical, sometimes hilarious, catching the idiom of the local life, and, in Beatlebone, nailing John Lennon, the wittiest and darkest Beatle, spot on"
"A genius of the language, teasing out impressionistic riffs that channel emotion into words"
"Beatlebone is glorious, savoury stuff ? part lark, part meditation, and a tiny part excavation"
All stars
Most relevant
Mesmerising. I'm sure this book will stay with me for a long time, perhaps forever, just like Lennon's memories of being 17 years old.

Perfect concept novel on a perfect concept album

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The story itself is fine, a bit fast paced and lots of conversation but the narrator is dire. Lennon is Irish but everyone else is scouse. It might be a better read but it was a slog to listen to the way the narrator emphasises breaks and words that shouldn't be emphasised. Not for me

Beetlebore

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This is a daring book. The language is precise, rhythmic, almost poetic, marrying scouse intonation, west of Ireland wit and the lyricism of Flann O'Brien. It's like an experiential biography, one that wrings the facts of a Lennon's life in order to divine his soul. In doing so it captures the universal hollowness of a life without love. The dis and dat of Barry's dialect grate on the ear occasionally, a minor quibble, but the authenticity of voice and development of character through dialogue are nothing short of masterful.

Stunning performance

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Nothing not to like. Brilliant prose read at a perfect pace. Heartbreaking reality. Didn’t want it to end

Fantastic

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I love the conceit: the fictionalised account of real events in which John Lennon tries to lose the press & find himself, in Western Ireland. I liked the unconventional structure: the author wrote his little article about how he conceived, researched & wrote the book, in the middle, not at the end. I enjoyed reading the book. But there are really only two characters & I failed to engage with either of them. The whole book strains under the weight oftoo much worn out, broken down psychedelia. There's a weird musing, or a spook, or a hallucination in almost every paragraph. Eventually I was listening to it because I enjoyed the sounds, like a piece of music. When it finished (at the end of the middle, because there seems to be no ending) I was surprised buts lightly relieved.

Sort of Great

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews