Old God's Time
Tom Kettle is a recently retired Garda Siochana detective living alone in a sea-front lean-to attached to a castle outside Dublin when two younger officers arrive at his door to ask about a priest he investigated decades earlier. The visit pulls Tom back into the case, into his marriage to June and the children they raised, and into the abuse he and June each survived as children inside the Irish Catholic care system. Barry writes the book as a drifting interior monologue across one Irish autumn, with the past surfacing in fragments and the present getting harder to hold steady, until what Tom has spent decades not letting himself see has to be looked at directly.
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The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A retired Irish detective living alone outside Dublin gets pulled back into an old priest-abuse case in Sebastian Barry's 2023 Booker-longlisted novel.
Old God's Time was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2023 and won several Irish literary prizes. Sebastian Barry has won the Costa Book of the Year twice for earlier novels.
Yes. Old God's Time uses Sebastian Barry's signature lyrical prose, with shifting timelines and meditative interior monologue. The subject matter (clerical sexual abuse, grief, suicide) is also heavy.
Old God's Time was written by Sebastian Barry, published in 2023 by Penguin Publishing Group.
Old God's Time is a standalone novel by Sebastian Barry, not part of a series.
Old God's Time is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.