9 Books that Inspired Sebastian Barry's 'Old God's Time'
By Damian Barr's Bookshop
9 Books that Inspired Sebastian Barry's 'Old God's Time'
By Damian Barr's Bookshop
We’re delighted to welcome award-winning author Sebastian Barry to the podcast reading from his new novel Old God’s Time. Recently retired policeman Tom Kettle is settling into the quiet of his new home, but when two former colleagues turn up at his door with questions about a decades-old case, one which Tom never quite came to terms with, he finds himself pulled into the darkest currents of his past.
A beautiful novel in which nothing is quite as it seems, Old God's Time is about that which haunts us. Published by independent press Faber, the book is available now in our shop.
Discover the books that inspired Old God's Time with captions prepared by the author. Happy reading!
Checkout 19: ‘A book to shake the world anew’ Sebastian Barry
Claire-Louise Bennett
£9.99 £9.49A more recent novel about the myriad threads, maelstroms, puzzles, storms, calms, curiosities of being alive. Fluid as music, fluent as a river.
The Chosen Ones
Steve Sem-Sandberg
£8.99 £8.54A demanding, overwhelming novel about the great cruelties done to children in institutions in Austria during the Nazi era. I read it some years ago and I am still thinking about it.
Netherland
Joseph O’Neill
£9.99 £9.49Just a great novel, admired by everyone, including Barack Obama. Everything it achieved was on its own terms, a classic word-of-mouth success. Perfect, propulsive writing.
Religio Medici And Urne-Buriall
Sir Thomas Browne
£15.99 £15.19I often recommend this book while knowing full well it probably isn’t for everyone, but there might be something in its idiosyncratic style that could prompt you into being a writer, as it did me.
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Ambrose Bierce
£11.46A short story that seems to contain something much larger. Also one that it is hard to say anything about, without giving away the secret of its power. Ambrose Berce was in himself quite secretive, finally disappearing off the face of the earth, a mystery still not solved today.
Middlesex
Jeffrey Eugenides
£9.99 £9.49This novel seems to fulfil all the requirements of the Great American Novel, or World Novel, or what have you. An inspired account of Cal Stephanides, intersex, embattled, radiant, and the curious history of a Greek family in America.
Middlemarch
George Eliot
£7.99Gorgeous, serious, human, humane – one of the supreme achievements of the novel form. Who can forget the numbing labours of Mr Casaubon and the peril of Dorothea Brooke?
The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy, Fiction, Classics
Thomas Hardy
£18.95I have always felt that it might be possible for a writer to create a style so proper to him or her or them, so intuitive, arising out of the synapses of that one brain, that the reader might immediately recognise any stray passage, even out of context. This book exemplifies that.
Nostromo
Joseph Conrad
£6.99 £6.64A long, curiously extravagant masterpiece, set in an imaginary South America. When he had finished his previous book, he declared he would never write again. And wrote this.