Secret Scripture

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 upheavel, 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.

About the Author :
Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955 and educated at the Catholic University School and Trinity College, Dublin, where he was later Writer Fellow in 1996. His plays include Boss Grady's Boys (1988), The Steward of Christendom (1995), Our Lady of Sligo (1998), and The Pride of Parnell Street (2007), and his novels The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998), Annie Dunne (2002), and most recently A Long Long Way (2005), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Dublin International Impac Prize. He has won among other awards the Irish-America Fund Literary Award, the London Critics Circle Award, and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize. He lives in Wicklow with his wife Ali and three children, Merlin, Coral, and Tobias.

Review :
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"