Old God's Time

‘I try to set aside a year just for reading and dreaming – that peculiar dreaming of writers. Then a year to write the book, and then a year to reconsider, edit, make raids on the text as it were. Like Billy the Kid. Pat Garrett would be the doubts and worries (quite important, if dangerous). I wait for the book essentially and once it starts, I try to give it its head, as judiciously as possible, hoping it won’t go and gallop off a cliff.

‘I write in what was once the rector’s study in an old rectory. It was also called the Bee Room, because gear for bee-keeping was kept in there. It has a good small stove, bookcases made by a genius carpenter I know (who accidentally gave me the title for this book), and since we came here it was been twice painted by me on the stern orders of my wife, Ali. The curtains have pineapples on them for some reason. An old post-office desk has seen everything written on it since 1986. Outside is Ali’s brilliant planting in the garden, but I face the wall to work.’

Read the full interview here.

‘Barry brilliantly evokes the distorting effect of trauma on memory as we enter an easy companionship with his gentle, funny protagonist. Both the legacy of historic child abuse in Ireland and the enduring power of love are sensitively explored in this compassionate and quietly furious book.’

Adam Begley, The Atlantic

‘His new novel, Old God’s Time, his ninth, is a beautiful, tragic book about an “old policeman with a buckled heart” who’s assailed at great length and yet enjoys streaks of jubilance, even after repeated assaults. I find the book powerful enough to want to bang the drum and say as loudly and clearly as I can that Barry ought to be widely read and revered – he ought to be a laureate for fiction everywhere.’

Susie Boyt, The Financial Times

‘This new work carries a similar sense of linking arms with you, as you settle down, braced both for startling pleasures and acutely drawn, unimaginable suffering; but in Old God’s Time Barry situates ambiguity squarely as the novel’s subject, its heart, perhaps its hero.’

Michael Schaub, NPR

‘Old God’s Time is a powerful, painful novel, another excellent offering from Barry, who is clearly one of the best Irish writers working today. It’s also a book suffused with a deep moral anger that refuses to let go of the crimes that destroyed the lives of so many. “People endured horrors, and then they couldn’t talk about them,” as Tom observes. “The real stories of the world were bedded in silence. The mortar was silence and the walls were sometimes impregnable.’

New York Times Book Review

‘The cruelty of religion in Ireland is a central concern of the novel, though one that sadly shocks us less than it would have once. Barry writes about this with compassion and quiet rage… the novel, for all its grimness, can be very funny.’

Jacob Brogan, The Washington Post

‘The story plays out in ways that repeatedly surprise, but its twists and turns are less important than its steady emotional beats, which elegantly braid the long work of mourning to the mere fact of love. As always, Barry is a prose stylist of near-miraculous skill, turning out crystalline sentence after crystalline sentence without ever leaving or betraying his protagonist’s perspective. His is an aphoristic imagination, and almost every chapter ends with a revelatory pirouette.’