Author Kevin Barry has published three award-winning books since 2007, two short story collections, There Are Little Kingdoms, and Dark Lies the Island, and one novel, The City of Bohane. His exuberant fiction is full of twisted, shape-shifting trickster types, and runs the full range in tone from dark comedy to outright horror. At home in Sligo, he talks to John Kelly about his new novel Beatlebone – his first attempt at historical fiction, he says – in which a crisis-ridden John Lennon tries to get to his island off Clew Bay, in Mayo in 1978. He also tells John about his first-ever short story, written in the aftermath of another kind of trauma.