Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry review – a cop you can’t trust
A murder investigation leads a retired policeman to confront his past in a stately, often dreamlike novel about the impact of trauma on memory
Mon 27 Feb 2023 09.00 GMT
Sebastian Barry has been acclaimed as a novelist, playwright and poet, twice winning the Costa book of the year for his novels The Secret Scripture and Days Without End, and serving as laureate for Irish fiction from 2018-21. It’s heartening, then, to see him continuing to take risks, as he does in his new novel, his 11th. Here, Barry’s cogent, often glossy prose looks to reproduce the backtracking of false testimony, feeding the reader dead-end leads and disinformation.