The Secret Scripture Sebastian Barry by Sebastian Barry 9781101202920, 1101202920 instant download after payment.

Sebastian Barry’s haunting story of a life blighted by terrible mistreatment and ignorance, yet still marked by love, passion and hope.

Nearing her 100th birthday, Roseanne McNulty faces an uncertain future. The psychiatric hospital where she’s spent most of her adult life is preparing to close. In the weeks leading up to this upheaval, she talks for hours to her psychiatrist. The story that emerges - of Roseanne’s family in 1930s Sligo - is at once shocking and deeply beautiful. Refracted through the haze of memory and retelling, her story becomes an alternative, secret history of Ireland’s changing character.

"...the book is arranged and imagined with immense tact so that it is never unbalanced by its ironies … As often in Barry's work, Irish history is a malignant omnipresence, its antediluvian hatreds and innumerable betrayals forming not so much a backdrop as a toxic sludge through which the characters must wade, as best they can."  -  Joseph O'Connor, The Guardian

"This is not, as the title might suggest, another Da Vinci Code clone. Barry writes vigorously and passionately about his native land. The story is told antiphonally, alternating narratives between a secret journal... kept by Roseanne McNulty, a patient in a mental hospital, and the “Commonplace Book” of her psychiatrist Dr. Grene, who’s dealing with serious issues of grief after the death of his wife... Barry beautifully braids together the convoluted threads of his narrative."  -  Kirkus Reviews

Sebastian Barry is an Irish playwright and novelist. His novels and plays have won, among other awards, the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize, the Costa Book of the Year award, the Irish Book Awards Best Novel, the Independent Booksellers Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He has also had two consecutive novels shortlisted for the Booker Prize.