Welcome to Literary Fiction on NTS. I'm Carrie Plitt here as always with my co-host Octavia Bright. Hello Octavia. Hi Carrie. And we have a really excellent guest today, Kevin Berry.

We do. We're super excited that Kevin's come on to talk to us. He's an Irish writer. He's published two collections of short stories.

And his first novel, City of Boen, was shortlisted for the 2013 International Impact Dublin Literary Award.

And we're going to be talking to him today about his second novel, which is the weird and

wonderful and trippy Beetlebone, published last year and winner of the Goldsmith Prize

for Experimental Fiction. And it's such a fantastic book.

It is fantastic. We both loved it. In Beetlebone, a fictional John Lennon spends most

of the book trying to get to a tiny island that he bought in Clue Bay off the west coast of Ireland.

I'm trying to. I don't know why I just did that in a faux Irish accent.

Inspired by his trip, today's theme is down the rabbit hole about all those literary escapes to the ends of the earth and to the center of the mind.

Trips generally, right? Yep, double meaning there. Well done, Ken.

We'll be lighting out for the territory with Huck Finn and going underground with the Invisible Man. So stay tuned for our interview with Kevin, our discussion of the theme,

and as always, some book recommendations. But first, here is our interview with Kevin Barry.

Kevin Barry, thanks so much for coming on literary fiction today. We've asked you to start with

the reading. So could you set it up a bit and then start? Okay. A man called John from Liverpool

has just arrived in the west of Ireland

and he's about to spend 200 odd pages trying to find his little island out there.

He sets out for the place as an animal might, as though on some fated migration.

There is nothing rational about it, nor even entirely sane, and this is the great attraction.

He's been travelling. Half the night east, and nobody has seen him, if you keep your eyes down down they can't see you.

Across the strung out skies and through the eerie airports and now he sits in the back of the old Mercedes. His brain feels like a city centre and there's a strange tingling in the bones

of his monkey feet. Fuck it, he will deal with it. The road unfurls as a black tongue and laps at the night.

...