Kevin Barry's Reading List

"it's just as good as all his other books"

"a beguiling take on first love in Peckham and the spiritual release of dancing"

"an artful cut-up of her journals"

"elegant"

"The more freethinking and malleable you are going into it, the better, and so openhearted youth may be the ideal condition."

"across Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell books, the flawless trilogy beginning with Wolf Hall, we have an unsurpassed account of midlife."

"I picked up Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte, and was soon moaning with lachrymose pleasure. I remain a capital R Romantic, as a reader and as a writer both."

"I was obsessed with his work in my 20s, with the glamour and burnish of his lines and with his knack, in a novel like Humboldt's Gift, for writing about lowlifes in the high style."

"The thousand-page portrait of the Utah killer Gary Gilmore achieves an incredible blank poetry, perhaps because the author (uncharacteristically) kept himself out of it."