Sebastian Barry Book order

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2023, this novel has been celebrated as a masterpiece by the Sunday Times and is a top ten bestseller. Tom Kettle, a retired policeman and widower, seeks solace in his new home in Dalkey, overlooking the sea. His tranquility is disrupted when two former colleagues visit to discuss a traumatic case from his past, one he has never fully reconciled. Additionally, his new neighbor, a mysterious young mother, reaches out for his assistance. This haunting narrative explores themes of family, loss, and love, revealing that nothing is quite as it seems. The Irish Times describes it as "stupendous," while the Daily Telegraph notes its rarity among cherished novels. Readers have praised it as a captivating family love story that lingers in the mind, deeply moving and beautifully told. Comments highlight its tragic yet humorous elements, with many calling it "absolute perfection" and expressing awe at the author's exceptional talent. The balance of grief and joy is masterfully conveyed, making this a memorable and transporting read.

There were no saints in any era, Tom knew, just good men and bad, and sometimes both in the one bottle. Retired policeman Tom Kettle is enjoying the quiet of his new home, a lean to annexed to a white Victorian Castle in Dalkey overlooking the sea.

From A Long Long Way, his Booker shortlisted novel about the Irish soldiers who fought for Britain during the First World War to his Donal McCann starring hit-play, The Steward of Christendom;

Willie Dunne ist gerade neunzehn, als er in den Krieg zieht. Von Politik versteht er nicht viel, auch von der Welt und ihrem Krieg nicht. Um wie sein Vater in Dublin Polizist zu werden, ist er nicht groß genug, aber gegen die 'Hunnen' kann die britische Armee jeden Mann gebrauchen, auch den kleingewachsenen Willie. Mit Tausenden anderer irischer Freiwilliger wird Schütze Dunne 1915 nach Flandern verschifft. Drei lange Jahre hungert, kämpft, friert und fürchtet sich Willie. Er flieht vor Giftgas, wartet auf Post von seiner geliebten Gretta, begräbt seine Freunde und seine Feinde. Für ihren Einsatz hatte Großbritannien den Iren die Selbstverwaltung versprochen. Doch während Irlands Söhne auf den Schlachtfeldern für die Krone sterben, schießen in Dublin britische Soldaten die Rebellen des Osteraufstands nieder. Mit Willie Dunne, dem Soldaten mit der schönen Stimme und dem unschuldigen Herzen, hat Sebastian Barry eine unvergessliche Figur geschaffen. In einer bilderreichen Sprache, die dem Grauen ihre poetische Kraft entgegenstellt, erzählt er die berührende Geschichte eines jungen Mannes, der sich im Niemandsland des Krieges verloren geht.

Even when you come out of bloodshed and disaster in the end you have got to learn to live. Winona is a young Lakota orphan adopted by former soldiers Thomas McNulty and John Cole. Living with Thomas and John on the farm they work in 1870s Tennessee, she is educated and loved, forging a life for herself beyond the violence and dispossession of her past. But the fragile harmony of her unlikely family unit, in the aftermath of the Civil War, is soon threatened by a further traumatic event, one which Winona struggles to confront, let alone understand. Told in Sebastian Barry's rare and masterly prose, A Thousand Moons is a powerful, moving study of one woman's journey, of her determination to write her own future, and of the enduring human capacity for love.

Entering the U.S. army after fleeing the Great Famine in Ireland, seventeen-year-old Thomas McNulty and his brother-in-arms, John Cole, experience the harrowing realities of the Indian wars and the American Civil War between the Wyoming plains and Tennessee.

From the bestselling author of The Secret Scripture, a heartbreaking story of lost love. Jack McNulty, a former UN observer, has worked around the world and seen extraordinary things but, as he contemplates his return to Ireland after many years, his memories are dominated by his tumultuous marriage to Mai Kirwan. A great beauty with a vivid mind, Mai was also an elusive and troubled soul, stuck in a marriage that couldn't last. The Temporary Gentleman is a powerful account of one man's attempt to come to terms with the savage realities of the past.

'As they used to say in Ireland, the devil only comes into good things.'Narrated by Lilly Bere, On Canaan's Side opens as she mourns the loss of her grandson, Bill. The story then goes back to the moment she was forced to flee Dublin, at the end of the First World War, and follows her life through into the new world of America, a world filled with both hope and danger. At once epic and intimate, Lilly's narrative unfurls as she tries to make sense of the sorrows and troubles of her life and of the people whose lives she has touched. Spanning nearly seven decades, it is a novel of memory, war, family-ties and love, which once again displays Sebastian Barry's exquisite prose and gift for storytelling.

Nearing her one-hundredth birthday, Roseanne McNulty faces an uncertain future, as the Roscommon Regional Mental hospital where she's spent the best part of her adult life prepares for closure. Over the weeks leading up to this upheaval, she talks often with her psychiatrist Dr Grene, and their relationship intensifies and complicates. Told through their respective journals, the story that emerges is at once shocking and deeply beautiful. Refracted through the haze of memory and retelling, Roseanne's story becomes an alternative, secret history of Ireland's changing character and the story of a life blighted by terrible mistreatment and ignorance, and yet marked still by love and passion and hope.

One of the most vivid and realised characters of recent fiction, Willie Dunne is the innocent hero of Sebastian Barry's highly acclaimed novel. Leaving Dublin to fight for the Allied cause as a member of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, he finds himself caught between the war playing out on foreign fields and that festering at home, waiting to erupt with the Easter Rising. Profoundly moving, intimate and epic, A Long Long Way charts and evokes a terrible coming of age, one too often written out of history.