PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
ABBEY'S BOOKSELLER PICK ----- Tom Kettle has retired from his lifelong career as a policeman. He hasn't quite settled into the routines of his new life and new flat (an addition to a Victorian castle) but there are moments of deep contentment as he leaves the stresses of work in the past and thinks about his son and daughter, and the beautiful woman he married. When a pair of young policemen, ex-colleagues of his, turn up one cold February evening seeking help on a reopened case, Tom - a decent, hardworking, thoughtful man - finds himself having to remember things he left uneasily in the past...
It's hard to say too much about the storyline. Barry is one of my personal top five authors - I'll read anything he writes, and trust in where he's taking me - and this new novel asks more of the reader than it tells. Tom is one of Barry's most memorable characters, but as a reader you can interpret what is happening in the way that makes sense to you. He steps back and forth in time and memory, and both are so vivid that Tom loses the present. Or does he? This is a deep well of a novel, Barry's glorious prose conceals, reveals, seals hidden depths, but overall it is a book of love and loss written with unerring empathy - and one that repays a second reading. Lindy
There were no saints in any era, Tom knew, just good men and bad, and sometimes both in the one bottle.
Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. The currentLaureate for Irish Fiction, his novels have twice won theCosta Book of the Year award, the Independent BooksellersAward and the Walter Scott Prize. He had two consecutivenovels shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, A Long LongWay (2005) and the top ten bestseller The Secret Scripture(2008), and has also won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize, the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year and the JamesTait Black Memorial Prize. He lives in County Wicklow.
ABBEY'S BOOKSELLER PICK ----- Tom Kettle has retired from his lifelong career as a policeman. He hasn't quite settled into the routines of his new life and new flat (an addition to a Victorian castle) but there are moments of deep contentment as he leaves the stresses of work in the past and thinks about his son and daughter, and the beautiful woman he married. When a pair of young policemen, ex-colleagues of his, turn up one cold February evening seeking help on a reopened case, Tom - a decent, hardworking, thoughtful man - finds himself having to remember things he left uneasily in the past...
It's hard to say too much about the storyline. Barry is one of my personal top five authors - I'll read anything he writes, and trust in where he's taking me - and this new novel asks more of the reader than it tells. Tom is one of Barry's most memorable characters, but as a reader you can interpret what is happening in the way that makes sense to you. He steps back and forth in time and memory, and both are so vivid that Tom loses the present. Or does he? This is a deep well of a novel, Barry's glorious prose conceals, reveals, seals hidden depths, but overall it is a book of love and loss written with unerring empathy - and one that repays a second reading. Lindy
