Sebastian Barry

Praised as a “master storyteller” (The Wall Street Journal) and hailed for his “flawless use of language” (Boston Herald), Irish author and playwright Sebastian Barry has created a powerful new novel about divided loyalties and the realities of war. In 1914, Willie Dunne, barely eighteen years old, leaves behind Dublin, his family, and the girl he plans to marry in order to enlist in the Allied forces and face the Germans on the Western Front. Once there, he encounters a horror of violence and gore he could not have imagined and sustains his spirit with only the words on the pages from home and the camaraderie of the mud-covered Irish boys who fight and die by his side. Dimly aware of the political tensions that have grown in Ireland in his absence, Willie returns on leave to find a world split and ravaged by forces closer to home. Despite the comfort he finds with his family, he knows he must rejoin his regiment and fight until the end. With grace and power, Sebastian Barry vividly renders Willie’s personal struggle as well as the overwhelming consequences of war.

Thomas McNulty, aged barely seventeen and having fled the Great Famine in Ireland, signs up for the U.S. Army in the 1850s. With his brother in arms, John Cole, Thomas goes on to fight in the Indian Wars—against the Sioux and the Yurok—and, ultimately, the Civil War. Orphans of terrible hardships themselves, the men find these days to be vivid and alive, despite the horrors they see and are complicit in. Moving from the plains of Wyoming to Tennessee, Sebastian Barry’s latest work is a masterpiece of atmosphere and language. An intensely poignant story of two men and the makeshift family they create with a young Sioux girl, Winona, Days Without End is a fresh and haunting portrait of the most fateful years in American history and is a novel never to be forgotten.

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.

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

A dazzling new novel about memory and identity set in Paris, Tennessee in the aftermath of the American Civil War from the Booker Prize shortlisted author Sebastian Barry.Winona Cole, an orphaned child of the Lakota Indians, finds herself growing up in an unconventional household on a farm in West Tennessee. Raised by her adoptive father John Cole and his brother-in-arms Thomas McNulty, this odd little family scrapes a living on Lige Magan’s farm with the help two freed slaves, the Bougereau siblings. They try to keep the brutal outside world at bay, along with their memories of the past. But Tennessee is a state still riven by the bitter legacy of the civil war and when first Winona and then Tennyson Bouguereau are violently attacked by forces unknown, Colonel Purton raises the Militia to quell the rebels and night-riders who are massing on the outskirts of town. Armed with a knife, Tennyson’s borrowed gun and the courage of her famous warrior mother Winona decides to take matters into her own hands and embarks on a quest for justice which will uncover the dark secrets of her past and finally reveal to her who she really is. Exquisitely written and thrumming with the irrepressible spirit of a young girl on the brink of adulthood, A Thousand Moons is a glorious story of love and redemption.

Longlisted for the Booker Prize, a mesmerizing new novel from the award-winning author of Old God's TimeA first-person narrative of Lilly Bere’s life, On Canaan’s Side opens as the eighty-five-year-old Irish émigré mourns the loss of her grandson, Bill. Lilly, the daughter of a Dublin policeman, revisits her eventful past, going back to the moment she was forced to flee Ireland at the end of the First World War. She continues her tale in America, where—far from her family—she first tastes the sweetness of love and the bitterness of betrayal.Spanning nearly seven decades, Sebastian Barry’s extraordinary fifth novel explores memory, war, family ties, love, and loss, distilling the complexity and beauty of life into his haunting prose.

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.

A stunning return from the prize-winning and best-selling author of The Secret ScriptureJack 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.

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 grand-aunt.It is a strange chance of happiness for Annie. 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 sometimes 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.

Now we've lived together in contentment, more or less, for nigh on twenty year. Like turtle doves. - In prison, I mean, for fuck's sake, the chances of that.PJ and sworn enemies destined to share one small room for twenty years. As the two men recall the joys and torments of life outside - the childhood excursions, a deadly brawl, past loves and summer dresses - slowly they uncover the tragic events that have lead them to their cell in Montjoy.A play that explores our capacity to commit the deadliest of crimes but also our capacity for survival, reconciliation and love, ON BLUEBERRY HILL by Sebastian Barry (twice winner of the Costa Book of the Year) premiered in a Fishamble production at the Pavilion Theatre as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival and at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris in October 2017.

Set in the county home in Baltinglass, Co. Dublin, in about 1932, The Steward of Christendom sees Lear-like Thomas Dunne, ex-Chief Superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, trying to break free of history and himself.The Steward of Christendom premiered to great acclaim at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, London, in April 1995, and returned to the main stage in September.

In two poignant, interweaving monologues, Janet and Joe tell the story of their lives of petty crime in Dublin, the act of violence that shattered their marriage and their long years of suffering before Joe's final redemptive act.

From her hospital bed in 1950's Dublin, Mai O'Hara recalls her life through morphine-induced memories and hallucinations. Dying of liver cancer caused by alcoholism, Mai reminisces on her youthful promise as a member of the Galway bourgeoisie; the death of one of her children; and of the marriage fueled by liquor, bickering, and remorse, to her husband, Jack who visits her on occasion as does her daughter, Joanie. Jack's visits to her bedside are a testament to the mutual hatred they share and the mutual dependence they have on each other. Through it all, Mai uses her mordant wit and vanity to pull her out of painful realizations. Once the first woman in Sligo to wear trousers, Mai emerges not only the victim of a broken marriage but a victim of an Ireland in which the Catholic middle-class has been nullified by spiritual and political isolation after the Civil War.

Intimate, revealing and generous of heart, these three lectures - written and delivered as part of his three year tenure as the Laureate for Irish fiction - reflect on his life and career so far, some of the formative moments and people he's met along the way, and the ongoing importance of creativity.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; from his first Costa Book of the Year novel The Secret Scripture to his second, Days Without End, a decade later, Sebastian Barry's writing career has been as long and varied as it has been extraordinary.

Three plays by the playwright credited with bringing poetic drama back to the Irish stage. Each has a tremendous sense of the beauty and humour to be found in ordinary life, however tragic its immediate circumstances. Full of brightness and fun, The Only True History of Lizzie Finn (Abbey Theatre, Dublin, October 1995) follows its heroine in her uneasy transition from English seaside music-hall star to Anglo-Irish lady. The Steward of Christendom (Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, London, April 1995) sees Lear-like Thomas Dunne, ex-Chief Superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, now in the county home, trying to break free of history and himself. White Woman Street (Bush Theatre, London, April 1992) trails Trooper O'Hara across the plains of Ohio in Easter 1916, as he seeks redemption from his memories in the train of gold.

Here, now, listen, I'll tell you a tale ...Daffodils are in bloom as dawn breaks over the foothills of Ballycumber, ushering in hope for a new day and stirring the ghosts of a past fraught with sorrow, anguish and emptiness. In search of advice, young Evans Stafford calls at the home of friend and strong-minded traditionalist, Nicholas Farquhar. The following day, as Farquhar learns the devastating consequences of this meeting, he discovers that his memories and words are governed by a buried history; a force far greater than himself. Sebastian Barry's "Tales of Ballycumber" premiered at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in September 2009.

Celebrated children's writer Hans Christian Andersen arrives, unannounced, for a stay at Gad's Hill Place in the Kent marshes - home to Charles Dickens and his large, charismatic family. To the lonely and eccentric guest, the members of Dickens' household seem to live a life of unreachable bliss. But with his broken English, Andersen doesn't at first see the storms brewing within the undeclared passions, a son about to go to India, and a growing strangeness at the heart of Dickens' marriage. "Andersen's English" by Sebastian Barry was premiered at the Theatre Royal, Bury, in February 2010 in a production by Out of Joint.

"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)

The latest dramatic offering from one of Ireland's master playwrightsJohnny Silvester should be enjoying his retirement in his opulent home outside Dublin, but the past is catching up with him. Once lionized for ushering the Irish Republic into the modern world, Silvester has fallen out of favor not only with the public, but also with his family and friends. Rapidly aging and fed up with a barrage of criticism, he retreats to his study where he reassures himself of his inculpability and awaits a call from his doctor--a call he expects will bring news of a fatal affliction. As he hovers near the phone his family, friends, colleagues, journalists, and students come forth with their reproaches. Among these visitors is the Morleyesque ghost of Cornelius, an ex-colleague and one-time friend for whose mental breakdown and death Silvester is responsible. With Hinterland Sebastian Barry examines the personal and public risks involved in making political advances on a national scale. Weaving modern history in with the life story of a man and his family, Barry has created another searching drama of the uneasy balance between heroism and roguery in Irish politics.

From his grave in the precincts of Canterbury Cathedral, Dallas Sweetman is called to give account. He tells a story of love and death, jealousy and miraculous happenings, of the divided loyalties of Protestants and Catholics in the Elizabethan Age. Before us, his judges, Dallas seeks to justify the actions of his life. But is he telling the truth? And can he be forgiven? The lost tradition of staging new plays at Canterbury Cathedral, most famously T. S. Eliot's "Murder in the Cathedral", was revived with the premiere of Sebastian Barry's "Dallas Sweetman" in September 2008.

OLD GOD'S TIME (MARCH 2023), SEBASTIAN BARRY'S STUNNING NEW NOVEL, AVAILABLE TO PRE-ORDER NOWWhistling 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 premi�red 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 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 premi�red at Bewley's Cafe Theatre, Dublin in 2002.

Interweaves the stories of a petty chief and his storyteller a neurotic young man, a boy and his father, a journey across America, and dealings in Key West

A series of fantastic adventures happen to a twelve-year-old boy when he steps into a strange new world.

The paradoxical business of being in love, the seamless fixed mythology that goes on between father and son, and the rhetorical instrument that language makes itself in the interests of persuasion are the themes explored.

Deux frères célibataires, sexagé Mick et Josey. Ce dernier est simple d'esprit. Ils vivent en retraités dans une ferme isolée du côté de Cork. Leurs conversations quotidiennes, au plus près des réalités de la vie campagnarde et du temps qu'il fait, roulent sur leurs souvenirs ressassés et leurs rêves, mais en fait tout se mêle intimement, le passé et le présent. Leurs parents morts interviennent à leur tour sur scène avec eux. C'est comme un vieux cinéma anachronique en noir et blanc, comme dit Barry. Un défilé un peu chaotique de fantasmes et de réalité lourde. Pièce de méditation et d'évocation, d'hallucination aussi et de vision. Nous restons très incertains sur le devenir possible des personnages, et incertains aussi sur la vraie nature de leur dialogue théâ à qui s'adressent-ils, comme hors du temps, dans ce curieux lyrisme à la fois chaotique et calme? En fait ils rêvent magnifiquement, les pieds dans la boue..