From the author of the wildly acclaimed Night Boat to Tangier, a New York Times "Top 10" book of 2019, here are stories of contemporary Ireland: full of love (and sex), melancholy and magic, bedecked in some of the most gorgeous prose being written today. With three novels and two short story collections published, Kevin Barry has steadily established his stature as one of the finest writers not just in Ireland but in the English language. All of his prodigious gifts of language, character, and setting in these eleven exquisite stories transport the reader to an Ireland both timeless and recognizably modern. We encounter a gallery of west Ireland characters poised on the cusp between hope and disaster: a forlorn and sensitive young man favouring art films and "by no means setting the night on fire" takes romantic aim at a mysterious Polish waitress in "The Coast of Leitrim"; a morbid town crier hounds the main drag of Limerick with the inevitable greeting "Did you hear who died?" in the drolly comic "Who's-Dead McCarthy"; and in the title story, a pregnant young woman waits anxiously in a van while her older fiancé undertakes, no doubt unwisely, robbing a petrol station with a claw hammer. Shot through with dark humor and the uncanny power of the primal and unchanging Irish landscape, the stories in That Old Country Music represent some of the finest fiction being written today. | That Old Country Music by Kevin Barry, Paperback | Indigo Chapters