Faber dives in for Barry's 'masterpiece'

Faber has snapped up Old God’s Time, the new novel by two-time Costa Book of the Year winner Sebastian Barry.

Publishing director Angus Cargill acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Derek Johns and Natasha Fairweather at RCW. Publication is slated for 2nd March 2023, with Viking following in the US on 21st March. Faber will release a special edition of the novel for independent bookshops and an audio edition, to be read by the author.

"Recently retired policeman Tom Kettle is settling into the quiet of his new home, a lean-to annexed to a Victorian Castle overlooking the Irish Sea," the synopsis reads. "For months he has barely seen a soul, catching only glimpses of his eccentric landlord and a nervous young mother who has moved in next door. Occasionally, fond memories of the past return, of his family, his beloved wife, June, and their two children. 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, haunting novel, in which nothing is quite as it seems, Old God’s Time is about what we live through, what we live with and what may survive of us."

Cargill said: "Returning to the landscape of Ireland in the second half of the 20th century with this new masterpiece, Sebastian Barry shows us, yet again, that he is one of the most empathetic and soulful storytellers we have. The reckoning of Tom Kettle will haunt and move readers for years to come."

Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. The 2018 to 2021 Laureate for Irish Fiction, his novels have won the Independent Booksellers Award and Walter Scott Prize. He had two consecutive novels shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and has also won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize, the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.