Old God's Time

A vivid and profound novel by a two-time Booker Prize finalist. Flawlessly constructed and masterfully written, it creates the sensation of a mirage, enchanting with a secret hidden in every sentence.

Police officer Tom Kettle has retired and settled into a cozy apartment overlooking the Irish Sea. While reliving memories, he lives in solitude, for months seeing no one except his eccentric landlord and the anxious young mother next door. Life for Tom has long been behind him; in his dreams and in waking hours he sees ghosts of the past, and he spends his days reflecting on his family—his beloved wife June, daughter Winnie, and son Joe. One day, at the doorstep, a pair of former colleagues appears, with questions about an unsolved case that once destroyed everything dear to him. This is how the dark shadows of the past—something he would like to forget—invade Tom’s present.

Sebastian Barry is one of today’s leading Irish writers, a two-time finalist and a five-time nominee for the Booker Prize.

In the audiobook version, the work’s intimate charm is enhanced by the velvet tone of Aleksey Bagdasarov.

Press reviews:

“‘Time of the Old God’ is a piercingly sad, poetic, and wise story about the unreliability of our memory—about the work of trauma, and how easily society is actually willing to tolerate violence against children, if that violence is hidden behind a curtain of proper respectability,” — Galina Yuzefovich

“For Sebastian Barry, a writer of almost Joyce-like scale, it is quite typical that a tragedy, at its core, contains moments of pure joy—and that sometimes comedy peeks out from under the tragedy. The magic of Barry is such that, after reading almost the entire book, you still won’t know whether some of its characters are real or whether they are ghosts born in the consciousness. And that lends the book incredible charm,” — The New Yorker

“Sometimes this is a druglike depiction of shifting memories, and a demonstration of how difficult it can be to tell one’s own story while its fragments keep dissolving into the ‘time of the old god.’ It’s a tribute to eternal love and its ability to illuminate darkness,” — The Guardian