Old God's Time: A Novel (2023) by Sebastian Barry

Audiobook Review

Old God's Time: A Novel (2023)

by Sebastian Barry

 Sebastian Barry is an Irish novelist and playwright known better on the other side of the Atlantic even though many of this books have been set in the New World.  That's how I discovered him, reading his novel from 2016, Days Without End which is about a gay relationship in 19th century frontier America.  The writing was sharp and the characters well observed.  I remember the reading experience fondly. In 2020 I also read the follow-up, A Thousand Moons, which carried forward the story of the same family, this time focusing mostly on their adopted daughter.   What I did not do is go back and read his back catalog, which features eight older novels one of which was a  Costa Prize winner.  Barry is also a perennial on the Booker Prize longlist, but without a win. 

  Barry's latest book, Old God's Time: A Novel, takes us back to Ireland.  Tom Kettle is a retired policeman, decamped to the Irish coast, determined to live out his retirement in a faux-castle.  He is a widower, and his children are city people, with a son in America. His quietude is disturbed when he is visited by two young policemen asking questions about the unsolved murder of a child molesting priest several decades ago.

  Unraveling the past is the concern of Old God's Time and while it takes the form of a detective novel, the contents are straight literary fiction- no tired genre tropes here.   There can be no description of plot points in a review of a book like this because it will spoil the reading/listening experience.