Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. In his beautiful, haunting novel, in which nothing is quite what it seems, Sebastian Barry explores what we live through, what we live with, and what may survive of us
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2008. Sebastian Barry’s haunting story of a life blighted by terrible mistreatment and ignorance, yet still marked by love, passion and hope.
Nearing her 100th birthday, Roseanne McNulty faces an uncertain future. The psychiatric hospital where she’s spent most of her adult life is preparing to close. In the weeks leading up to this upheaval, she talks for hours to her psychiatrist. The story that emerges - of Roseanne’s family in 1930s Sligo - is at once shocking and deeply beautiful. Refracted through the haze of memory and retelling, her story becomes an alternative, secret history of Ireland’s changing character.
Sebastian Barry
About the Author
Sebastian Barry is one of a small group of authors to have been nominated for the Booker Prize five timesHe makes enthrallingly beautiful prose out of the wreckage of these lives by allowing them to have the complication of actual history in all its messy elusiveness
Watch Sebastian Barry read from The Secret Scripture
Sebastian Barry was named Laureate for Irish Fiction for 2018 to 2021. As part of his work, he ran a series called #LaureateReads on YouTube in 2020, where he chose four of his novels to read from.
Watch his reading from The Secret Scripture below.
Other nominated books by Sebastian Barry
Sebastian Barry’s atmospheric portrayal of America in the making is also an intensely poignant story of two men and the hands dealt them by life.
Spanning nearly seven decades, this novel of memory, war, family ties and love showcases Sebastian Barry’s exquisite prose and gift for storytelling.
Sebastian Barry’s powerful novel about the harsh realities of war examines the Great War from the perspective of Irish soldiers fighting for Britain.
