The Secret Scripture

In a mental hospital in modern-day Ireland, Roseanne McNulty sits; a taciturn old woman about whom little is known. She may be approaching her 100th birthday, but there is no family to celebrate or even confirm her age. Preparing herself for death, she resolves to write a “brittle and honest-minded history of myself”, stowing the loose, pen-scored pages under a floorboard in her room.

In the telling, Roseanne's patchwork of memories becomes “history” - according to her own definition, a “fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth”. But it also becomes “scripture”: a sacred text. There is something spiritual in Roseanne's brave reverence for life, in her willingness to find angels in the midst of cruelty, prejudice and ignorance.

Sebastian Barry writes about loss, broken promises, failed hopes. The setting is the western Ireland of traditional literary depiction - subtle Yeatsian references abound in the novel - but Barry's destabilising of inherited images gives the book a punkish energy as well as fiery beauty.