Wild Houses

‘Like almost all my previous work, Wild Houses is set in a small town in the west of Ireland, right up against the tearing relentlessness of the Atlantic. It feels like one of the edges of the world, a place of tight knit, stoic community and, if you are careless or unlucky, a place of impossible loneliness. Dev, the first character we meet and the character I first started writing the book around years ago, is a reclusive young man cursed by just such luck.’

Read the full interview here.

‘With two collections behind him, Barrett is well established as a master both of the short story and the sentence; his debut novel confirms and extends all his promise. Wild Houses is a propulsive, darkly comic and superlatively written account of frustration and misadventure in a small Irish town. Nicky is a self-reliant 17-year-old whose dreams of escape are slowly coming into focus when her hapless boyfriend Doll gets taken hostage by local goons over a drug debt; misfit Dev is reluctantly embroiled. The connections between the cast and the past tragedies that have forged them are expertly revealed in a slow-burn study of character and fate that’s also an edge-of-your-seat thriller. Violence and farce mingle in a novel that feels as sharp, funny and bitingly bittersweet as life.’

Ron Charles, The Washington Post

‘Barrett’s dialogue, spiked with the timbre of Irish speech and shards of local slang, makes these characters sound so close you’ll be wiping their spittle off your face […] The craft of Wild Houses shows a master writer spreading his wings — not for show but like the stealthy attack of a barn owl. Despite moments of violence that tear through the plot, the most arresting scenes are those of anticipated brutality.’

Keiran Goddard, The Guardian

‘On the face of it the story is slight, but what elevates Wild Houses is the deftness of its telling. Barrett leans heavily on a type of proleptic plotting, flashing forward to points of crisis and then rolling the clock back to allow the reader to discover how things ended up that way. A genre convention most commonly used in thrillers, it’s executed here with an impressive lightness of touch.’

George Cochrane, Times Literary Supplement

‘I would say I was unable to put Wild Houses down, but I was constantly putting it down, to make a note of a new word or felicitous phrase […] Colin Barrett’s short stories can sometimes be too heavy on the show-stopping detail. Here he keeps his descriptive powers on a shorter leash; when he does let fly, it connects.’

Max Gray, Chicago Review of Books

‘Quite an achievement, a novel of crisp sentences and understated language that propel a gripping, cinematic narrative […] Barrett resists redemption, and in so doing, gestures towards a more complicated world, one more fitting for our present geopolitical moment, in which we all seem to perch breathlessly on the edge of change in all its frightening possibility.’

Harvey Freedenberg, Shelf Awareness

‘Barrett moves his plot efficiently between the story of Doll’s captivity and Nicky’s uneasy mind in what feels to her like an interminable weekend. There’s pure pleasure in reading Barrett’s crisp prose, brimming with descriptions like one of Gabe, a man “with a face on him like a vandalized church, long and angular and pitted, eyes glinting deep in their sockets like smashed-out windows,” or when he likens Mulrooney’s voice to “the lively, frictionless register of a priest or a minor politician working the room at a parish fundraiser.”

But what ultimately elevates the novel is Barrett’s ability to blend an unsparing eye with genuine empathy for some superficially unappealing characters readers nonetheless end up caring about, even as they recognize their profound flaws.’