Old God’s Time

Description

From the two-time Booker Prize finalist author, a dazzlingly written novel exploring love, memory, grief, and long-buried secrets

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, Winnie and Joe.

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.Praise for the work of Sebsatian Barry:

“One of the best writers in the English language . . . [Barry’s] soul-wrenching narratives and incantatory prose . . . are powerful canvases of the human spirit.” —The Washington Post

“Barry’s novels give us lives, not plots . . . Every one of his novels is luminous.  Not one of them sounds like anyone else.” —Robert Gottlieb, The New York Review of Books

“Nobody writes like, nobody takes risks like, nobody pushes the language, and the heart, and the two together, quite like Sebastian Barry does.” —Ali Smith

“Sebastian Barry’s handling of voice and cadence is masterly. His fictional universe is filled with life, quiet truth and exquisite intimacy; it is also fully alert to the power and irony of history.” —Colm Tóibín
 
“[Barry writes] in language of surpassing beauty . . . It is like a song, with all the pulse of the Irish language, a song sung liltingly and plaintively from the top of Ben Bulben into the airy night.” —The New York Times

“Barry’s lens is so cohesive, so gracefully rendered, that his words have the stony allure of the Irish poets and the lyrical pull of an epic storyteller.” —The Boston GlobeSebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. He is the author of eight previous novels, as well as numerous plays. He is the first novelist to twice win the Costa Book of the Year award, for Days Without End and The Secret Scripture, has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, for A Long Long Way and The Secret Scripture, and has twice been longlisted for the Booker Prize, for Days Without End and On Canaan’s Side. He was the Laureate for Irish Fiction from 2018–2021, and lives in County Wicklow, Ireland.
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