There's a certain kind of reader whose favourite books are just human islands bumping up against each other in speech, and the coasts of their personalities grinding and shearing off variably, without any "story" as such. If that's you, you'll like this a lot. The set-up is: two decrepit old Corkonian drug-runners mosey around a ferry terminal reminiscing about their lives—in the course of which they've left themselves without anyone or anything but each other—while waiting for the estranged daughter of one of them to maybe turn up on the next boat.

You can tell this was originally a movie script. The best chapter, where the hero weighs up whether or not to start a fight as he walks across a room, has a stoned Homeric detachment, like we're a camera and not looking through a set of eyes. The meat of the book is dialogue between two distinct yammering voices. The prose that interrupts it is at once lower and higher in register and doesn't sit next to it quite comfortably. Lower because de-Irished (or so it seemed to me), higher because, while the vocab is pretty tempered, it's always straining to falute up Mt Profundity. But when the author got out of the way, the human drama affected me plenty. The good bits are good and the failures are at least born of aiming high. Go and read it.