Old God's Time

LoveReading Says

Exquisitely written in an achingly quiet style, Sebastian Barry’s Old God’s Time has thunderous power. It’s a beautiful, brutal book about the depth of love, the depth of pain and sorrow, and the ragged nature of memory, as revealed when a recently retired policeman reflects on his life and losses as unresolved aspects of his past are awoken.

Widower Tom Kelley is “an old policeman with a buckled heart”. Now retired, he leads a largely solitary life, with memories of June, his darling wife, and children (son Joseph and “magnificent daughter” Winnie) adding dashes of brightness to his lonely days in a flat overlooking the Irish Sea. Then, when two former colleagues turn up asking about an old case involving the church, Tom is confronted by traumas he’d tried to bury.

Dark, starkly poetic and profound, this is storytelling at its most devastatingly powerful: “what was at the heart of it? His life, his little life? The fog edged away from the shore of himself, the sea opened like the stage in a theatre, the helpful sun burned in its element, there was a truth told to him…”

Reviewed by Joanne Owen
Joanne Owen’s lifelong love of reading and writing began when she was growing up in Pembrokeshire, and very much wished that witches (and Mrs Pepperpot) were real.
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