Night Boat to Tangier

A Novel

By: Kevin Barry

Narrated by: Kevin Barry

Length: 5 hrs and 39 mins

Publisher's summary

One of The New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2019
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, Lit Hub, The Millions, The Paris Review, and NPR
Number One Irish Times Best Seller
Longlisted for The Booker Prize

From the acclaimed author of the international sensations City of Bohane and Beatlebone, a striking and gorgeous new novel of two aging criminals at the tail ends of their damage-filled careers. A superbly melancholic melody of a novel full of beautiful phrases and terrible men.

In the dark waiting room of the ferry terminal in the sketchy Spanish port of Algeciras, two aging Irishmen - Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond, longtime partners in the lucrative and dangerous enterprise of smuggling drugs - sit at night, none too patiently. It is October 23, 2018, and they are expecting Maurice's estranged daughter, Dilly, to either arrive on a boat coming from Tangier or depart on one heading there. This nocturnal vigil will initiate an extraordinary journey back in time to excavate their shared history of violence, romance, mutual betrayals, and serial exiles, rendered with the dark humor and the hard-boiled Hibernian lyricism that have made Kevin Barry one of the most striking and admired fiction writers at work today.

©2019 Kevin Barry (P)2019 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"Try the name Flann O'Brien. Try James Joyce. Try Roddy Doyle. Try Patrick McCabe. Try Wilde, try McGahern, try Behan. And now try the name Kevin Barry. See how it fits in perfectly among the others - Kevin Barry is one of the most original, daring, and seriously funny writers ever to come out of Ireland. I'd walk a hundred miles for a new Barry book and I would make the happy journey home, laughing." (Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin)

"You read this, and you can tell Barry doesn't take his sentences lightly. It'd kill him to mess one up. And he doesn't waste them. So what you get is his style's flawless, and yet it isn't soft. There isn't anything nice about the story, just that it's told beautifully." (Nico Walker, author of Cherry)

"It’s a Kevin Barry novel, so the brilliance is expected; everything else is a brilliant surprise." (Roddy Doyle, author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha)

Brilliant performance

If you want an example of how a narrator should perform, this is the Audible you should listen to, even if the performance is by the writer. The writer should be person the most in tune with his characters. Here, Kevin Barry is perfectly modulated to his drama, it’s gritty settings, and its characters soaked in regret, mental and physical pain, and abuse. Visceral and vivid, Barry never relents on telling this tough dark story in an austere, poetic, style. Read the book while listening to the Audible. It is just one of those kind of books that have to be experienced. Kevin Barry provides every aspect.

dark well written

This was a bit too literary. I find it hard to concentrate on literary books when driving. The story is reminiscent and regrets, not a strong story line. The writing is beautiful and haunting.

Narration to die for

Hard to imagine a better narrated book. By turns pithy, morbid, and elegiac. Lovely, lovely.

More Irish than Mediterranean

The best part is the author's Irish voice reciting his tale. Many times, he speaks in maddening short phrases, but eventually, I got used to it and appreciated it. The story is sad memories of irresponsible love and their working friendship smuggling drugs and squandering any success. l doubt I would have enjoyed reading this, especially if it was longer.

Great Writing, Narration Can Be Overkill At Times

Kevin Barry has a great eye for detail. Easy to see why this was long-listed for the Booker prize. Barry’s voice is chilling. Which is fitting for the story overall. However, the gritty feeling doesn’t vary an ounce as the story POV goes from past to present, or make to female.

It’s third person narration. So we can get past this in terms of the story being told from a single narrator who is gruff and a man, told from a point in the future, I suppose. But it’s so hard and unwavering that it sometimes feels like, as a reader, I would catch more of the subtlety and beauty of his writing if I read the novel—which I have. And found listening to it a very different experience.

Looking over the reviews, a lot of people loved the voice. So I’m going to leave off this review by saying you will likely enjoy this production if you’re coming to it for the first time. On the other hand, if you read the novel, the narration here will either give you a whole other level of emotion, or flatten it just a bit if your imagination gave these characters the distinction of variation in your head on a previous reading.

This may just be me, and your own mileage may vary. It’s a well written book regardless and I would recommend it highly!

Fantastic story enhanced by the author's perfoy

Everyone in my family read this book a couple of years ago and loved it. I skipped it for some reason but decided to listen to it on audible. what a fantastic story. Its one of the best reading performances I've ever heard. Took me a while to get used to the Irish accent but it adds so much.

Poetic and enigmatic

Exalts the aspirations and futility of common crooks, in a tapestry of mistake and painted remembrance.

Amazing!

Leave to an Irishman to strike the perfect balance of crust and lyricism. A dark tale with a thin skein of hope and redemption. First work I have listened to by Barry but not the last.

Two Spooky Guys Waiting…

“Night Boat to Tangier” offers a spooky look at two aging gangsters sitting around a ferry terminal in Algeciras, Spain. They are waiting to find the older’s daughter, Dilly, expected to pass through on her way to or from Tangier. The two men mostly reminisce about the old days, when they dealt a lot of drugs, committed their share of violence, fell for beautiful women and spent their money foolishly.

Maurice and Charlie, the two men, make entertaining company. Their conversation is intimate, amusing, often passive-aggressive. They are sensitive brutes who have done repellant things. But at this stage of their lives, they have accepted the past, and they can look back stoically on the pain they have both caused and suffered.

Kevin Barry narrates the novel, and you can sense his deep affection for his characters. He reads with an intense near-whisper. There is an unrelenting drive in the narration, and I sometimes wondered if a professional narrator would have done a better job modulating the tone and differentiating the voices of the men. But overall, the narration added to the ghostly quality of this dark bromance.

A grim topic handled honestly

Kevin Barry is a terrific writer and dynamic narrator. In Night Boat to Tangier, he captures our attention immediately with the dialog between two central characters, and the vivid, grimy setting they occupy in his opening scene.
Though not normally drawn to this kind of grim plot, I can appreciate a writer's honesty.
Throughout the story, we see an unfolding, a revealing. The depth of caring between friends. The pain and betrayal inflicted by their addictions. Their involvement in the drug trade.
Barry is able to untangle the story for us: letting us understand more than a bit of the intensity of pain and the humor that grows from shared experiences between old friends with this dangerous shared history.