Limerick-born author Kevin Barry’s immensely entertaining debut collection of stories is filled with compelling characters, each of them fleshed out by his pungent power of description.

Most of his stories draw their power from character and setting rather than from plot, though when plot rears its head, it does so with unsettling suddenness.

In the Irish-set tales that make up the bulk of the collection, the lives Barry depicts are for the most part squalid ones, lived in small nameless towns scattered across the midlands.

If a time or era is mentioned, it is either the 1980s the author’s own teenage years or the present day.

Sometimes a story references both past and present, as in the symbolic Ideal Homes, which has a set of twins looking for trouble on the streets of small town that’s soon to be encroached by a nearby city.

But even there, the already aged chestnut of a ‘changing Ireland’ is overridden by a sense of continuity between a faded past and bleak present.

The theme that really arises from the characters that populate these stories, taken as a whole, is one of immobility, which seems odd as they are so entertaining to read.

Barry’s outlook on life and his hopes for our humanity would seem to be dire, but it doesn’t make his characters any less vividly enjoyable.

Most of his characters speak in deliciously colourful Irishese and Barry exhibits a genius for dialogue but the stories are saved from the threat of sentiment by a treacly vein of black humour.

This is sometimes subdued, coming through in flashes from beneath greyer, moodier material, and at other times forms the foundations of a story, with the moodiness taking a glowering backseat in its turn.

The stories place distance between characters and reader. We are drawn in to their thoughts and memories in passing, and they themselves rarely stop to reflect.

There is a certain cinematic surface tension, a feeling of seeing only what’s visible, like the emotions played out over face rather than the deeper sensations behind it.

The characters give gripping performances, but there often remains the murky sense that there must be more about them to know.

For the most part, this more tantalising than frustrating.

The landscapes and townscapes that Barry describes are as well defined as his characters; and like them, even when the settings are unlovely, he draws them so precisely that their very drabness seems cartoonishly vivid.

At other times, the stark romance of the countryside felt.

In the brilliant Last Days the Buffalo, the protagonist, Foley, who ‘‘was six foot five on the morning of his fourteenth birthday and half as wide again’’, walks through an rural evening idyll brimful wildflowers and the calls of insects and birds, but refuses see any of it, instead remembering his roughshod, violent youth and battles with his father and the Christian Brothers.

This story is a perfect balance between Barry’s outsized yet human characters, and the luminous sense of movement he lends to the Irish landscape.

His characters, including the giant Foley, are often revealed to possess secrets of a magical or otherworldly or romantic nature, but the secrets never change their lives, or at least not for the better.

These are not stories of dramatic conflict resolving themselves into something new, but rather distillations of certain aspects of humanity.

There is an embarrassment of riches in these stories; Barry’s writing remains assured even while his language leaps acrobatically off the page.

He often traces a fine line between cliche and realism, but traces that line with confidence. There Are Little Kingdoms is a brilliant example of short story writing at its best.