Old God's Time: A Novel

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE

Named a Best Book of 2023 by the New Yorker, Washington Post, NPR, and Kirkus Reviews

“You should be reading Sebastian Barry. [He] has a special understanding of the human heart.” —The Atlantic

“A prose stylist of near-miraculous skill. . . Barry reaches deep into the messenger bag of mystery fiction and turns the whole business inside out . . . marvelous.” —The Washington Post

“An unforgettable novel from one of our finest writers.” —Douglas Stuart, author of Shuggie Bain

From the five-time Booker Prize nominee and 2018-2021 Laureate for Irish Fiction, a virtuosic, profound novel exploring love, memory, grief, and long-buried secrets

Recently 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.

Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. He is the author of eight previous novels, as well as numerous plays. He is the first novelist to twice win the Costa Book of the Year award, for Days Without End and The Secret Scripture, has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, for A Long Long Way and The Secret Scripture, and has twice been longlisted for the Booker Prize, for Days Without End and On Canaan’s Side. He was the Laureate for Irish Fiction from 2018–2021, and lives in County Wicklow, Ireland.

ISBN: 9780593296127
Format: Paperback
Pages: 272
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: March 19, 2024

Praise for Old God's Time:

“I find Old God’s Time powerful enough to want to bang the drum and say as loudly and clearly as I can that Barry ought to be widely read and revered—he ought to be a laureate for fiction everywhere . . . Reading his novels is like braving Irish weather: You’re chilled and drenched and dazzled and baked in buffeting succession . . . lyricism and drama jostle in nearly all [Barry's] sentences . . . paragraphs unspool like spells, dreamy incantations . . . You should be reading Sebastian Barry. Ireland’s fiction laureate has a special understanding of the human heart.” —Adam Begley, The Atlantic

“Few contemporary writers have done more with the natural resource of Irish English, or with the buried tensions at the heart of Irish identity, than [Barry] . . . A writer of almost Joycean amplitude, Barry never segregates the comic and the tragic . . . What’s striking about Old God’s Time is the scrupulous realism that Barry brings to his outlandish premise—and his guileful refusal ever to clarify what kind of novel we are reading . . . Barry’s [prose is] casually exquisite.” —Giles Harvey, The New Yorker

“Marvelous . . . Barry reaches deep into the messenger bag of mystery fiction and turns the whole business inside out to show the soft suede of its lining and the loosening stitches of the seams . . . The story plays out in ways that repeatedly surprise, but its twists and turns are less important than its steady emotional beats, which elegantly braid the long work of mourning to the mere fact of love. As always, Barry is a prose stylist of near-miraculous skill, turning out crystalline sentence after crystalline sentence without ever leaving or betraying his protagonist’s perspective. His is an aphoristic imagination, and almost every chapter ends with a revelatory pirouette.” —The Washington Post

“Few can write like Sebastian Barry, there is a real thrill as each sentence unfolds. Old God's Time is a portrait of a good man facing the failings of his past. It is wonderfully alive because Barry is so attuned to the human condition, to the poetry in ordinary lives. Full of love and grief and heartache, this is an unforgettable novel from one of our finest writers.” —Douglas Stuart, author of Shuggie Bain