LoveReading Says
LoveReading Says
Exquisitely written in an achingly quiet style, Sebastian Barry’s Old God’s Time has thunderous power. It’s a beautiful, brutal book about the depth of love, the depth of pain and sorrow, and the ragged nature of memory, as revealed when a recently retired policeman reflects on his life and losses as unresolved aspects of his past are awoken.
Widower Tom Kelley is “an old policeman with a buckled heart”. Now retired, he leads a largely solitary life, with memories of June, his darling wife, and children (son Joseph and “magnificent daughter” Winnie) adding dashes of brightness to his lonely days in a flat overlooking the Irish Sea. Then, when two former colleagues turn up asking about an old case involving the church, Tom is confronted by traumas he’d tried to bury.
Dark, starkly poetic and profound, this is storytelling at its most devastatingly powerful: “what was at the heart of it? His life, his little life? The fog edged away from the shore of himself, the sea opened like the stage in a theatre, the helpful sun burned in its element, there was a truth told to him…”
Joanne Owen
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Old God's Time Synopsis
'Have you ever been the custodian of a story no one else believed?'
'Oh yes,' he said.
'You have?'
'Yes,' he said.
'Then I can tell you.'
Recently retired policeman Tom Kettle is settling into the quiet of his new home, a lean-to annexed to a Victorian castle overlooking the Irish Sea. For months he has barely seen a soul, catching only glimpses of his eccentric landlord and a nervous young mother who has moved in next door. Occasionally, fond memories return, of his family, his beloved wife June and their two children.
But when two former colleagues turn up at his door with questions about a decades-old case, one which Tom never quite came to terms with, he finds himself pulled into the darkest currents of his past.
A beautiful, haunting novel, in which nothing is quite as it seems, Old God's Time is about what we live through, what we live with, and what may survive of us.
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Press Reviews
Sebastian Barry Press Reviews
'Wonderfully alive. . . an unforgettable novel from one of our finest writers.' DOUGLAS STUART
'His work reminds us how much we need these rare gifts of the natural storyteller.' TESSA HADLEY
Author
About Sebastian Barry
Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. His plays include The Steward of Christendom and The Pride of Parnell Street and his novels include The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, Annie Dunne, A Long Long Way and The Secret Scripture. A Long Long Way was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Dublin International Impac Prize, and was the Dublin: One City One Book for 2007. The Secret Scripture won the Costa Book of the Year award, the Irish Book Awards Best Novel, the Independent Booksellers Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He lives in Wicklow with his wife and three children.
Photo credit: ©Alan Betson, The Irish Times
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