Tom is often gone for days over to Bundoran or such places with his little orchestra and he plays for the holiday folk and the townspeople letting off steam after the long weeks of work. He plays waltzes, polkas and foxtrots For me, the novel told a timeless story that is relevant on any continent. The story of young men being forced to take sides during civil war, whether they are politically aligned with either side or not. This story shows how that worked for Eneas in Ireland during the Troubles, and for his friend in Africa during the revolution to throw off the colonial powers. And it was so in the American Civil War as well. Brother fighting brother. It also told the story of the long memory of revenge, the strong love of family and home, and how they all work for an exile.

last, and enjoying the spot of supper in the lamplit parlour at first, and then away up to bed like a ghost, his mother after scrubbing at his nails fiercely, as tired and contented as humankind may be. A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact. Eneas looks into the face of the killer and it has the set effort in it of a person struggling for precision in a world of Godless souls and wormy hearts." His only recourse was to become a wandering man without a country, one who was forced to forsake his homeland and drift from nation to nation. Sharon from NYC: Have you read either of the McCourt brothers' book? What is your take with the fascination with the topic here in the States?

Sebastian Barry

The book speaks eloquently on the ramifications of the politics of unrest on individual lives. Was this a case of the writer's environment simply manifesting itself in his work, or was it an end you hoped to achieve when you began writing the story of Eneas McNulty? Eneas McNulty is born in the first year of the twentieth century in County Sligo in the west of Ireland. The earnest and hard- Besides the hero's name, there exist parallels between Eneas McNulty and Virgil's wanderer, Aeneas. Mindful of Joyce's use of Homeric myth, did you approach this technique with trepidation, or did it seem naturally appropriate for the telling of Eneas's story?

Eneas first earns Jonno's friendship with a well-timed word of warning that allows Jonno and his wild boys to escape the wrath of the local Presbyterian rector, whose orchard they were plundering. For an all-too-brief season of mischief-making and welcome camaraderie, Eneas finds acceptance among the gang. ("No treasure in life beyond pals," hisfathertells him, words that will echo poignantly in the years to come.) But Jonno, an orphan who has spent his childhood in the cold embrace of foster care, goes "serious on the world" at a young age and gradually leaves Eneas behind as he ventures out in search of "shillings and employments." Abandoned, and feeling something of the unexplainable attraction the men of Sligo have always held for the land of France, Eneas enlists to fight in the European war. But due to his age and the lateness of his decision, the closest he ever gets to striking a blow for France is service aboard a British Merchant Navy vessel assigned to the port of Galveston, Texas. So, having a bad day, are you? Well, let me tell you about Eneas McNulty. By my calculation, he had about fifty years of bad days, some worse than others, but only a very, very few that could be placed in the “good” category. Welcome to the barnesandnoble.com author auditorium. We are extremely excited to welcome author Sebastian Barry, who will be joining us live from Ireland to discuss his new book THE WHEREABOUTS OF ENEAS MCNULTY. at five, and nothing his own, but that temporary little room. The dark linoleum curls at the edge where it meets the dark wall. There is a pewter jug on the bedside table that likes to hoard the sun and moon on its curve. There is a tallSebastian Barry μέσω του ήρωά του στον (αρχαίο) ελληνικό πολιτισμό και στις ομηρικές έννοιες της μοίρας και του νόστου: As readers we are obliged to question Roseanne as a reliable narrator. Time, age and memory are all at work here, yet against all the odds she does succeed in telling us her heart-breaking story. The denouement is an ingenious coming together of all the elements of this memorable novel. DISCUSSION QUESTIONS• Eneas is dogged throughout his life by the collapse of his friendship with Jonno Lynch and the fallout that accompanies it. How does their relationship change throughout the course of the story? In what ways does it remain constant? How does their relationship fit or defy our conventional notions of a hero/villain relationship?

There are two first-person narrative voices in Sebastian Barry's new novel, The Secret Scripture, and both of them are trying, in their different ways, to make sense of the past - their own and their country's. The first, and most moving, belongs to Roseanne, an Irish woman who is 100 and who has spent most of her adult life in the Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital, which is just about to be closed down. Throughout her confinement, Roseanne has written her life story, the 'secret scripture' of the book's title, a clandestine act of testimony and reclamation. 'I am completely alone,' she says, early on. 'There is no one in the world that knows me outside of this place... I am only a thing left over, a remnant woman...' The first novel, ‘The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty’, was published in 1998. Written with a lyricism I feel is unique to Barry, the prose carries you along a winding stream of a storyline, following the protagonist Eneas after the First World War and later his experiences in the Royal Irish Constabulary, and later still, Africa. Eneas is in many ways the duffer of the family. He has no marketable, skills or talents, only a most tender heart. He is someone who from the off is not quite going to make a successful way in the world. Loyal, a bit of a dreamer, he would probably have led a quiet, peaceful, homely life in another time and place. Married,probably worked with his hands, skilfully, married a local girl, been a devoted husband, father, grandfather, and died as peacefully as he lived.The actual story of Eneas, as it unfolded, consistently surprised me. It interested me greatly that he was on the "wrong" side of p. 224: “The days of letters are well gone now, and the only touch he has now against his mother must be in dreams, and truth to tell his dreams are poor things really and he has a contempt for them. But now and then some nights she flits through in strange guises, whether as the avenging crone of old dreams, or the bright flame of an aisling that he has no need of, and rises unbidden from the paltry bog of his sleeping brain. He knows that she and all her world will die, and her secrets too, and he knows that all traces of even his own days will be pulled from the streets of Sligo, and the names of the shops will change again, and someone’s premises here and others there will suffer the great iron ball, and he knows that in that sense he is already dead, that time has already taken care of him. There is the living breathing world of Ireland with De Valera and the sons of powerful men taking power as they come to age. Its all the old story over again except this time the rich man is themselves in a motorcar and a house on a respectable road. Well, he must not worry about politics, he’s beyond them now. He has never been for politics, only the flotsam of its minor storms.”

So many richly layered images – I got stopped by that ‘lovely trout of freedom’ whilst so many meanings began to reveal themselves. A true poet’s magic and potency imbues Barry’s writing, and, because of the character of Eneas, there is nothing awkwardly bolted on to him. This does feel like the voice of character, not the writer ‘doing beautiful writing’ Sebastian Barry: Out there somewhere in the dark and bright of the world there is a whole raft, a scattered tribe of men like Eneas, I am sure, from the twenties right up to the present. God give them quiet sleep.Sebastian Barry is a playwright, novelist, and poet whose best-known play, The Steward of Christendom, has won numerous awards. He lives in Dublin, Ireland. Besides being a critically-acclaimed novelist, Sebastian Barry is a talented playwright and as many passages sprinkled throughout his prose demonstrate, he is also a gifted poet. He sees the wild boys go by the house too, at the front, his own thin and narrow house on John Street and he longs, he longs to open the door and fight them and win his place among them, but he is lanky and weak as yet.