THE BOOK
2024 CATEGORY WINNER – DEBUT FICTION
WILD HOUSES
BY COLIN BARRETT
As Ballina prepares for its biggest weekend of the year, the simmering feud between small-time dealer, Cillian English, and County Mayo’s fraternal enforcers, Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, spills over into violence and an ugly ultimatum.
Read our exclusive extract from “Wild Houses” here.
COLIN BARRETT
Colin Barrett grew up in County Mayo, Ireland. His stories have been published in the Stinging Fly, Granta, Harper’s and the New Yorker. His first book, the short story collection Young Skins, won the Guardian First Book Award, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His second collection, Homesickness, made the New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year and was a Book of the Year in Oprah Daily and the Irish Times.
Q&A with the author
What is your favourite place to write?
In a quiet house! Well, that’s where I of necessity end up writing. I do like to bring a notebook on any kind of journey involving public transport. Traveling puts me just offbeam enough to capture some good stray thoughts.
What book would you most recommend to others?
The Brothers Karamazov.
Do you identify with any of the characters in the book?
All of them. I put aspects of myself into all of them. Not in any biographical sense, but in how a given character deals with e.g. a confrontation, keeping a secret, avoiding some sensitive subject, trying to show consideration or affection or gracefulness. Some characters have a tint of aspirationality [sic] to them. Nicky for instance, is as guarded and occasionally aloof, perhaps, as I feel I was at seventeen, but much more stoic!
Photography © Marc Sethi
The judges said: “Our winner Wild Houses was a clear stand-out for the sheer quality of its writing; a literary page-turner, with prose both lyrical and absorbing, brilliant dialogue and characters who seem to have walked off the street and onto the page. The wit and humour in this novel belies an undercurrent of menace, and yet there is deep empathy and compassion at its heart.”
2024 Debut Fiction judges
