Sebastian Barry

OLD GOD'S TIME (MARCH 2023), SEBASTIAN BARRY'S STUNNING NEW NOVEL, AVAILABLE TO PRE-ORDER NOWOne 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.

Leaving behind his family in Dublin in order to join the Allied forces during World War I, eighteen-year-old Willie Dunne survives the horrors of war through his correspondences with loved ones and his friendships with fellow soldiers, but his return home is devastated by political tensions in Ireland. Reprint.

OLD GOD'S TIME (MARCH 2023), SEBASTIAN BARRY'S STUNNING NEW NOVEL, AVAILABLE TO PRE-ORDER NOWAnnie 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.

Hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as "the finest book to come out of Europe this year," The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty is acclaimed Irish playwright Sebastian Barry's lyrical tale of a fugitive everyman. Sebastian Barry's latest novel, Days Without End, is now available. For Eneas McNulty, a happy, innocent childhood in County Sligo in the early 1900s gives way to an Ireland wracked by violence and conflict. Unable to find work in the depressed times after World War I, Eneas joins the British-led police force, the Royal Irish Constabulary--a decision that alters the course of his life. Branded a traitor by Irish nationalists and pursued by IRA hitmen, Eneas is forced to flee his homeland, his family, and Viv, the woman he loves. His wandering terminates on the Isle of Dogs, a haven for sailors, where a lifetime of loss is redeemed by a final act of generosity. The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty is the story of a lost man and a compelling saga that illuminates Ireland's complex history.

"Cerebral and lyrical, he is the new crown prince of Ireland's majestic theatrical tradition" (Newsweek) Mai O'Hara lies in a Dublin hospital in 1953 attended by a young nursing Sister and visited by the uneasy figures of her husband Jack, daughter Joanie and her dead father. Fuelled by alcohol, passion and despair it is the story of her flamboyant but destructive relationship with Jack, the lost country of her childhood and unfulfilled expectations in the wake of Irish independence and self-rule. Our Lady of Sligo was produced at the Royal National Theatre in co-production with Out of Joint, directed by Max Stafford-Clark, in April 1998.

The play that established Barry as one of Ireland's most powerful contemporary playwrights Thomas Dunne, ex-chief superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan police looks back on his career built during the latter years of Queen Victoria's empire, from his home in Baltinglass in Dublin in 1932. Like King Lear, Dunne tries valiantly to break free of history and himself. The Steward of Christendom took London by storm when it premiered at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in March 1995 with Donal McCann in the title role. It transferred to Broadway and has toured around the world." Sebastian Barry's beautiful and devastating memory play...will stay with us for many years." (New York Times)

"Cerebral and lyrical, he is the new crown prince of Ireland's majestic theatrical tradition" (Newsweek) In Boss Grady's boys, Mick and Josey are two old fellas employed on a hill-farm on the Cork-Kerry border, still dreaming of the Wild West and freedom; Prayers of Sherkin, set in the 1890s, captures a moment of change at which ideology and doctrine are discarded for the sake of survival "The play is like a gentle requiem for a dead community" (Irish Times); White Woman Street is about Irish emigration to the South of America "Weaving together a Western...and a very Irish drama of exile" (Independent). The Only True History of Lizzie Finn, is based on the life of the author's own grandmother and in it "Barry uses Lizzie's dilemma to explore the economic decay of the 1890s landowning class and the whaleboned snobberies of rural Ireland" (Guardian). In The Steward of Christendom, Thomas Dunne, an ex-chief superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan police looks back on his career built during the latter years of Queen Victoria's empire, from his home in Baltinglass in Dublin in 1932." Sebastian Barry's plays are about history, but not in any very obvious or familiar sense... The history that informs these plays is a history of counter-currents, of lost strands, of untold stories. Against the simple narrative of Irish history as a long tale of colonisation and resistance, Barry releases more complex stories of people who are, in one way or another, a disgrace to that history... In Sebastian Barry's luminous plays, grace and disgrace are not opposites but constant companions." (Fintan O'Toole)