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.

Old God's Time is a misleading novel. What appears on the surface to be a mystery cliché -- an old detective is called back to the force to solve a mystery he's closely tied to -- is actually the scaffolding for a story about being lost in dementia. That depiction of dementia is deep and thorough, leading Barry to have time gaps occur and to mix delusion with reality in Tom Kettle's experience. All of us at NUBClub thought that it was an incredibly vivid representation of being disconnected from reality and there are just beautiful and true scenes of forgetfulness, embarrassment, and confusion that moved us. But Barry's commitment to this foggy consciousness meant that there was very little cuing about what was real and what wasn't. A lot of us wanted to understand what was actually happening, especially when the protagonist starts thinking about the loss of his wife and children, but the instability of the novel left us suspicious of scenes that seemed to be revelatory. Some of also had issue with the story's plot. For obvious reasons, Barry doesn't want to pull Kettle out of his fog, so the conclusion of the novel can't be a full return to clarity. Instead, the title here seems apt. Kettle is in old god's time, a time that shifts and stalls without real awareness. The resolution of the novel is his escape to understanding about the losses in his life and peace with them. However, this means that the very end of the novel is crammed with explication of the stories of each of those characters, and some of us found that to get very didactic. It seemed to us that Barry's choice to be so inscrutable throughout the novel meant that he couldn't pace information in a more natural way, and that meant we were both confused about what was real and hammered with too much at the end. It's certainly not a bad novel -- Barry is a very good writer of prose and as a depiction of a mind getting lost, we're never read anything quite this immersive. But none of us loved it either. It's a fascinating experiment, but at least for us, not the greatest story.