Best known for his outstanding comic novels about John Lennon ("Beatlebone") and an Irish ex-con looking for his estranged daughter ("Night Boat to Tangier"), Barry skillfully blends humor and pathos.

"Ox Mountain Death Song" — one of several stories set in western Ireland — centers on a humorous yet dramatic showdown. Sgt. Tom Brown's father "drank himself into the clay of the place," but his weakness is for sweets. An outwardly absurd figure — he patrols while downing "honey from a squeezable tub" — the sergeant's clashing impulses, revealed with expert subtlety, fuel his stunning confrontation with a charismatic felon.

Barry works in dual emotional registers throughout the book. "Saint Catherine of the Fields" is a wry portrait of a lovelorn musicologist who rediscovers a forgotten ballad about people "as deranged by matters of the heart and loins as I was now."

"Who's-Dead McCarthy" features a morbid busybody whose fondness for tales of bizarre death belies his existential wisdom: Most of us "turn our minds from that which is inevitable — Con McCarthy could not turn from it."

Barry's most moving story follows a 9-year-old refugee as she makes an unlikely friend and forges a new life in the Irish countryside. "Roma Kid" is full of elegant sentences that summon "the sound of the high wood by night in the wind" and the blooming of wild plants, which "was an itch on the air and caused giddiness in them both."