Books by Sebastian Barry

Winner of the 2016 Costa Book of the YearWinner of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2017Winner of the Independent Bookshop Week Book Award 2017Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017'Pitch perfect, the outstanding novel of the Year.' ObserverAfter signing up for the US army in the 1850s, aged barely seventeen, Thomas McNulty and his brother-in-arms, John Cole, fight in the Indian Wars and the Civil War. Having both fled terrible hardships, their days are now vivid and filled with wonder, despite the horrors they both see and are complicit in. Then when a young Indian girl crosses their path, the possibility of lasting happiness seems within reach, if only they can survive.

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.

This volume contains the three most recent plays by the playwright credited with bringing poetic drama back to the Irish stage. The plays are "White Woman Street", "Steward of Christendom" and "The Only True History of Lizzie Finn".

Jack McNulty is a 'temporary gentleman', an Irishman whose commission in the British army in the Second World War was never permanent. In 1957, sitting in his lodgings in Accra, he urgently sets out to write his story. He feels he cannot take one step further, or even hardly a breath, without looking back at all that has befallen him.He is an ordinary man, both petty and heroic, but he has seen extraordinary things. He has worked and wandered around the world - as a soldier, an engineer, a UN observer - trying to follow his childhood ambition to better himself. And he has had a strange and tumultuous marriage. Mai Kirwan was a great beauty of Sligo in the 1920s, a vivid mind, but an elusive and mysterious figure too. Jack married her, and shared his life with her, but in time she slipped from his grasp.A heart-breaking portrait of one man's life - of his demons and his lost love - The Temporary Gentleman is, ultimately, a novel about Jack's last bid for freedom, from the savage realities of the past and from himself.

See, love between a man and a woman, it's - private. It happens where you never do see it. In rooms.Italy 1 - Ireland 0...The score that marked Ireland's demoralizing exit from Italia '90 took its toll. No more so than for Janet and Joe Brady of Parnell Street who lost far more than the match that night. Some years on, Joe and Janet reveal the intimacies of their love and the rupture of their marriage, through interconnecting monologues that also evoke their life-long love affair with Dublin city itself. Sebastian Barry's explores with vivid tenderness the devastating effects of public and private acts of violence. This is an intimate, heroic tale of ordinary and extraordinary life on the streets of Dublin. Fishamble's world premiere of The Pride of Parnell Street opened at the Tricycle Theatre, London, and as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival at the Tivoli Theatre, Dublin, in September 2007.

'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 Sligo, 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.

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. 'A stunning achievement ... Barry has written one of the most moving fictional accounts of war that surely must rank alongside those real-life testimonies of Owen and Sasson.' Sunday Tribune'The story grips, shocks and saddens; but most importantly refuses to be forgotten.' The Times'In darkly beautiful, inventive and evocative prose Barry tells the filthy truths of war.' Ireland on Sunday'With disarming lyricism, Barry's novel leads the readers into a hellish no-man's-land, where the true madness of war can only be felt and understood rather than said.' Observer'[It] passionately documents a period of collective sacrifice and courage across Europe and beyond, as well as momentous political upheaval in Ireland.' Time Out'The most remarkable shared imaginative universe in Irish writing belongs to the poet, playwright and novelist Sebastian Barry who, like an archaeologist, has slowly and deftly delved back through his myriad ancestors to let them breathe again ... A Long Long Way is a major novel ... perhaps his greatest work.' Dermot Bolger, Sunday Independent'It is more mature, more modulated, more quietly challenging than any of his fiction heretofore, A Long Long Way therefore deserves to win for Barry a renewed attention.' Irish Times 'A deeply moving story of courage and fidelity' J M Coetzee'Many say Sebastian Barry writes like an angel and they are right, provided they remember he is on the side of the angels that fell. He shares his longing that his heroes might roar with a horrified I will not serve. But they do serve and are destroyed. Then his sympathy overwhelms, as it does in A Long Long Way. A possessed, powerful novel.' Frank McGuinness'This is Sebastian Barry's song of innocence and experience, composed with poetic grace and an eye, both unflinching and tender, for savage detail and moments of pure beauty. It is also an astonishing display of Barry's gift for creating a memorable character, whom he has written, indelibly, back into a history which continues to haunt us.' Colm Tobin'The story of young Willie Dunne, caught between the competing and irreconcilable loyalties of family, faith and fatherland, is tragic - as indeed the stories of so many young Irishmen who joined up in 1914 must have been, whether they died or lived. But even more powerful is Sebastian Barry's prose, which fuses the vernacular with the poetic, in a way that is lyrical and yet entirely apt. Willie Dunne's voice, like his dilemmas, has the resonance of authenticity.' Hew Strachan, author of The First World War'As always, I enjoyed the way in which Barry tells the Irish story from a reverse angle, from the un-easy, anti-heroic point of view. He proves once again that the artist makes the best historian, and that the tragic figures who are wrong-footed by history, provide the most compelling account of the past.' Hugo Hamilton

"Cerebral and lyrical, he is the new crown prince of Ireland's majestic theatrical tradition" (Newsweek)

Following the end of the First World War, Eneas McNulty joins the British-led Royal Irish Constabulary. With all those around him becoming soldiers of a different kind, however, it proves to be the defining decision of his life when, having witnessed the murder of a fellow RIC policeman, he is wrongly accused of identifying the executioners. With a sentence of death passed over him he is forced to flee Sligo, his friends, family and beloved girl, Viv. What follows is the story of this flight, his subsequent wanderings, and the haunting pull of home that always afflicts him. Tender, witty, troubling and tragic, The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty tells the secret history of a lost man.

Annie Dunne and her cousin Sarah live and work on a small farm in a remote and beautiful part of Wicklow in late 1950s Ireland. All about them the old green roads are being tarred, cars are being purchased, a way of life is about to disappear. Like two old rooks, they hold to their hill in Kelsha, cherishing everything. When Annie's nephew and his wife are set to go to London to find work, their two small children, a little boy and his older sister, are brought down to spend the summer with their great-aunt.It is a strange chance for happiness for Annie. But against that happiness moves the figure of Billy Kerr, with his ambiguous attentions to Sarah, threatening to drive Annie from her last niche of safety in the world. The world of childish innocence also proves darkened and puzzling to her, and she struggles to find clear ground, clear light - to preserve her sense of love and place against these subtle forces of disquiet.A summer of adventure, pain, delight and ultimately epiphany unfolds for both the children and their elderly caretakers in this poignant and exquisitely told story of innocence, loss and reconciliation.

This is the script of a play in which an old woman lying in her bed remembers her past as the vivid present.

Whistling PsycheA dark night, an old waiting room and two supposed strangers eager to reach their destinations. In the cold hours that rest between nightfall and daybreak, silent questions prompt unexpected revelations. Two souls share a passion for reform, but only one - Miss Nightingale - has been honoured. The other, Dr Barry, would never receive the same acclaim, but notoriety came after death and for a very different reason . . .Whistling Psyche premiered at the Almeida Theatre, London in May 2004.Fred and Jane explores the deep and sustaining friendship between two nuns, Anna and Beatrice, as they recall the trials and joys of religious life.'This is Barry at his best: evocative, gentle, suffused with the beauty of the simple and the joy of turning the strange into the familiar.' Sunday Tribune'A rare delight. A clear-running joy.' Sunday Independent'A triumph in its own right.' RTEFred and Jane premiered at Bewley's Cafe Theatre, Dublin in 2002.

Hvordan lyder det, når et 89 år gammelt hjerte brister? Der vil måske ikke være meget mere end stilhed, og i hvert fald blot en ganske lille, sprød lyd.Hjertet tilhører Lilly Bere. Året er 1992, og Lillys elskede barnebarn, Bill, har begået selvmord efter at være vendt hjem fra den første Golfkrig. Derfor sidder den 89-årige dame og nedskriver tanker om sit liv, for også hun har besluttet at afslutte det. Tankerne er i kronologisk orden, men afbrydes af småfortællinger om Lillys dagligdag og starter, da hun og hendes forlovede Tagd ved slutningen af Første Verdenskrig, må flygte fra hjemlandet Irland til et nyt liv i det forjættede Amerika.DAGE MED LILLY er en knugende, barsk og på samme tid smuk roman om håb, familiebånd, krig og kærlighed og en flugt fra Irland til et nyt liv i det forjættede Amerika.Pressen skriver:»DAGE med Lilly er en fin og læseværdig roman om en kvindeskæbne i det 20. århundrede... «Rasmus Dahlberg, Weekendavisen