Sebastian Barry

Times bestselling author of Days Without End and The Secret Scripture joins us in Edinburgh for his new novel Old God's Time, an extraordinary novel about memory, love, mystery and reckoning. This is 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.

'Have you ever been the custodian of a story no one else believed?'

'Oh yes,' he said.

'You have?'

'Yes,' he said.

'Then I can tell you.'

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.

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.

One of our most soulful living writers, Sebastian Barry was the Laureate for Irish Fiction between 2018-21. His novels have twice won the Costa Book of the Year award, the Independent Booksellers Award and the Walter Scott Prize. He has had two consecutive novels shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, A Long Long Way (2005) and the top ten bestseller The Secret Scripture (2008), and has also won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize, the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.