Book review: Beatlebone

Kevin Barry has accepted he will never write the great American Jewish novel but he still spends nights fretting about what John Lennon’s widow Yoko On might think of Beatlebone. He explains all to Caroline O’Doherty.

SURREAL is a word often used to describe Kevin Barry’s fiction but there are times his own life provides competition.

Since publication of his first novel, City of Bohane, he gets awestruck Americans sending him photographs of themselves dressed up for Halloween as futuristic feuding gang members plucked from its pages.