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The Secret Scripture

The Secret Scripture

by SebastianBarry (Author)

  • Used

    Hardcover 2008

    $3.30

  • Used

    Paperback 2008

    $3.30

  • New

    Paperback 2009

    $17.66
Synopsis

Nearing her one-hundredth birthday, Roseanne McNulty faces an uncertain future, as the Roscommon Regional Mental hospital where she's spent the best part of her adult life prepares for closure. Over the weeks leading up to this upheaval, she talks often with her psychiatrist Dr Grene, and their relationship intensifies and complicates. Told through their respective journals, the story that emerges is at once shocking and deeply beautiful. Refracted through the haze of memory and retelling, Roseanne's story becomes an alternative, secret history of Ireland's changing character and the story of a life blighted by terrible mistreatment and ignorance, and yet marked still by love and passion and hope.

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4 in stock

More Information

Format: Hardcover
 Pages: 320
 Edition: Main
 Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 01 May 2008
ISBN 10: 0571215289
ISBN 13: 9780571215287
Book Overview: The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry is a beautiful and moving novel of a remarkable woman's stolen life.
 Prizes: Winner of Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year Award 2009 and Tubridy Show Listeners' Choice Award 2009 and Costa Novel Award 2008 and Costa Book of the Year 2008. Shortlisted for Galaxy British Book Awards: Borders Author of the Year 2009 and Independent Booksellers' Week Book of the Year Award: Adults' Book of the Year 2009 and Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2008.

Media Reviews
aThese lives are reimagined in language of surpassing beauty. Above all it is the surpassing quality of Mr. Barryas language that gives it its power . . . Mr. Barry has said that his novels and plays often begin as poems (he is a published poet), but his language never clots the flow of his story; it never gives a whiff of labor and strain. It is like a song, with all the pulse of the Irish language, a song sung liltingly and plaintively from the top of Ben Bulben into the airy night.a
aDinitia Smith, NY Times Daily Book Review
aJust as he (Barry) describes people stopping in the street to look at Roseanne, so I often found myself stopping to look at the sentences he gave her, wanting to pause and copy them down . . . When I reached the last page, I did feel that I had shared a profound experience . . .a
aMargot Livesey, The Boston Globe
aLuminous and lyrical.a
aPam Houston, O Magazine
aIad nominate Sebastian Barry, the most exhilarating prose stylist in Irish fictionawhich just about makes him, by definition, the best prose writer in the English language . . . Barry has shown a dazzling facility with poetry, drama and fictionahis works form a mosaic-like whole, though each stands on its own. He never uses a fancy word when a simple one will do; his characters speak a plain vocabulary, but in cadences tempered and honed into poetry . . . Sebastian Barryas achievement is unlike that of any other modern Western writer, a tapestry of interrelated works in different mediums woven from strands of his past and that of his country. The Secret Scripture fits seamlessly into a vision that seeks to restore with language that which has been taken away byhistory.a
aAllen Barra, Salon.com
Author Bio
Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. His plays include Our Lady of Sligo and The Pride of Parnell Street, and his novels, Annie Dunne and most recently, A Long Long Way. He has won numerous awards, among them the London Critics Circle Award, and now lives in Wicklow with his family.