If Wikipedia is to be believed (and what kind of a world would we be living in if we couldn’t make our way with this one certainty to hand?), Kevin Barry has declared himself to ‘want my reader to adore me, to a disturbing, stalkerish degree.’ I don’t know if reading someone’s Wikipedia entry counts as stalking, but I do know this: having had my first taste of Barry’s prose in the shape of The Heart in Winter, I will need to have some more of it soon. And while I wouldn’t call that disturbing...