I finished Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry as my first book of #AVeryMerryReadathon2019! I actually haven’t seen many reviews of this one, but it made the NYTimes top ten list this year as one of the five fiction picks and I always love reading the picks.

This book is about two old Irish men, Maurice and Charlie, both drug smugglers, sitting in the Algeciras ferry terminal waiting for Maurice’s estranged daughter Dilly to either arrive or leave on a boat to or from Tangier. The chapters alternate between the ferry terminal and flashing back in time to give snippets of the story of how the men got to where they are.

This book is full of sharp and witty prose. The banter between the old gangsters is really funny and almost charming. The flashbacks provide backstory, and we learn how Charlie got his limp and Maurice lost his eye, while the men’s estrangement from Dilly is slowly revealed.

Barry is exceptional at building an atmosphere. The flashbacks are set in various places around Ireland and the Mediterranean and they all feel distinct. In particular, the tension in one bar scene was palpable, as one patron makes his way to the bathroom to try and overhear bits of the conversation between Maurice and Charlie. I could picture the dark bar and my heart was racing in anticipation of conflict, but I was also laughing at the bartender’s tactics for trying to know what was happening and prevent violence.

This book is a really quick read. If you like troubled characters and a slowly revealing plot that’s not much of a plot but more of a melancholy look back at the lives of two aging gangsters, and you don’t mind a lack of quotation marks, this might be a good one for you! I really enjoyed it.