Sebastian Barry
Sebastian Barry, named Irish fiction laureate in 2018, is a playwright and author whose novels include A Long Long Way, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, as was The Secret Scripture, which was also a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist and winner of the Costa Book of the Year Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, and the Irish Novel of the Year. His plays have been produced in London, Dublin, Sydney, and New York.
All Books By Sebastian Barry
A Long, Long Way
- By: Sebastian Barry
- Length: 9 hours 17 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2022
- Language: English
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4.13(7484 ratings)
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.
... Read moreA Thousand Moons
- By: Sebastian Barry
- Narrator: Kyla Garcia
- Length: 7 hours 45 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2020
- Language: English
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3.9(2557 ratings)
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
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 of 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.
... Read moreAnnie Dunne
- By: Sebastian Barry
- Narrator: Caroline Lennon
- Length: 7 hours 52 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2022
- Language: English
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3.89(1084 ratings)
It is 1959 in Wicklow, Ireland, and Annie and her cousin Sarah are living and working together to keep Sarah’s small farm running. Suddenly, Annie’s young niece and nephew are left in their care.
Unprepared for the chaos that two children inevitably bring, but nervously excited nonetheless, Annie finds the interruption of her normal life and her last chance at happiness complicated further by the attention being paid to Sarah by a local man with his eye on the farm.
A summer of adventure, pain, delight, and, ultimately, epiphany unfolds for both the children and their caretakers in this poignant and exquisitely told story of innocence, loss, and reconciliation.
... Read moreDays without End
- By: Sebastian Barry
- Narrator: Aidan Kelly
- Length: 7 hours 58 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2017
- Language: English
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3.97(13770 ratings)
From Sebastian Barry, a two-time finalist for the Man Booker Prize, comes a powerful and unforgettable novel chronicling a young Irish immigrant’s army years in the Indian wars and the American Civil War.
Thomas McNulty, having fled the Great Famine in Ireland and now barely seventeen years old, signs up for the US Army in the 1850s and with his brother in arms, John Cole, goes to fight in the Indian Wars–against the Sioux and the Yurok–and, ultimately, in the Civil War. Orphans of terrible hardships themselves, they 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.
... Read moreOld God’s Time
- By: Sebastian Barry
- Narrator: Stephen Hogan
- Length: 8 hours 34 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2023
- Language: English
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4.11(1020 ratings)
From the two-time Booker Prize finalist author, a dazzlingly written novel exploring memory, grief, and long-buried secrets
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. For months he has barely seen a soul, but his peace is interrupted when two former colleagues turn up at his door to ask questions about a decades-old case. A traumatic case which Tom never quite came to terms with.
His peace is further disturbed by a young mother and family who move in next door, a woman on the run from her own troubles. And what of Tom’s family, his wife June, and their two children?
Old God’s Time is a beautiful, haunting novel in which everything is not quite what it seems—a novel about what we live through, what we live with, and what may survive us.
... Read moreOn Canaan’s Side
- By: Sebastian Barry
- Narrator: Wanda McCaddon
- Length: 7 hours 20 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2007
- Language: English
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3.86(4048 ratings)
From the two-time Man Booker short–listed author of The Secret Scripture comes a magnificent new novel that is the story of the twentieth century in America.
Told in the first person, as a narrative of Lilly Bere’s life over seventeen days, On Canaan’s Side opens as Lilly mourns the loss of her grandson, Bill. Lilly revisits her past, going back to the moment she was forced to flee Ireland at the end of the First World War, and continues her tale in America, a world filled with both hope and danger.
At once epic and intimate, Lilly’s story unfolds 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, from the Great Depression to World War II and the Vietnam War, it is the heartbreaking story of a woman whose capability to love is enormous and whose compassion, even for those who have wronged her, is astonishing.
... Read moreThe Secret Scripture
- By: Sebastian Barry
- Narrator: Wanda McCaddon
- Length: 9 hours 45 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2008
- Language: English
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3.81(13908 ratings)
Roseanne McNulty, once one of the most beautiful and beguiling girls in County Sligo, Ireland, is now an elderly patient at a mental hospital. As her hundredth year draws near, she decides to record the events of her life but hides the manuscript.
Meanwhile, the hospital is preparing to close and is evaluating which patients can return to society. Dr. Grene, Roseanne’s caretaker, takes a special interest in her case. In his research, he discovers a document written by a local priest that tells a very different story of Roseanne’s life than what she recalls. As doctor and patient attempt to understand each other, they begin to uncover long-buried secrets about themselves.
Set against an Ireland besieged by conflict, The Secret Scripture is an epic story of love, betrayal, and unavoidable tragedy.
... Read moreThe Temporary Gentleman
- By: Sebastian Barry
- Narrator: Gerard Doyle
- Length: 7 hours 22 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2014
- Language: English
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3.78(1659 ratings)
A stunning new novel from the Man Booker shortlisted author of The Secret Scripture
In this highly anticipated new novel, Irishman Jack McNulty is a “temporary gentleman”–an Irishman whose commission in the British army in WWII was never permanent. Sitting in his lodgings in Accra, Ghana, in 1957, he’s writing the story of his life with desperate urgency. He cannot take one step further without examining all of the extraordinary events that he has seen. A lifetime of war and world travel–as a soldier in WWII, an engineer, a UN observer–has brought him to this point. But the memory that weighs heaviest on his heart is that of the beautiful Mai Kirwan and their tempestuous, heartbreaking marriage. Mai was once the great beauty of Sligo, a magnetic yet unstable woman who, after sharing a life with Jack, gradually slipped from his grasp.
Award-winning author Sebastian Barry’s The Temporary Gentleman is the sixth book in his cycle of separate yet interconnected novels that brilliantly reimagine characters from Barry’s own family.
... Read more