The Irish writer Kevin Barry won the Goldsmiths Prize on Wednesday for his second novel, “Beatlebone,” which imagines John Lennon visiting a small island off the west coast of Ireland in 1978. The prize, established in 2013, honors British and Irish writers for “fiction that breaks the mold or opens up new possibilities for the novel form,” and comes with an award of £10,000, or about $15,000.

“Beatlebone,” published last month in Britain, will be released in the United States next week. In the Guardian, Edward Docx called the book’s sentences “original, exact and telling,” but concluded that “somehow the sum was slightly less than its many fine and savoursome parts.”

Mr. Barry is a previous winner of the lucrative International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, for his first novel, “City of Bohane.”