Book description
Nearing her one-hundredth birthday, Roseanne McNulty faces an
uncertain future, as the Roscommon Regional Mental hospital where
she's spent the best part of her adult life prepares for closure. Over
the weeks leading up to this upheaval, she talks often with her
psychiatrist Dr Grene, and their relationship intensifies and
complicates. Told through their respective journals, the story that
emerges is at once shocking and deeply beautiful. Refracted through
the haze of memory and retelling, Roseanne's story becomes an
alternative, secret history of Ireland's changing character and the
story of a life blighted by terrible mistreatment and ignorance, and
yet marked still by love and passion and hope.
Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955 and educated at The
Catholic University School and Trinity College, Dublin, where he was
later Writer Fellow in 1996. His plays include Boss Grady's Boys
(1988), The Steward of Christendom (1995), Our Lady of Sligo (1998),
and The Pride of Parnell Street (2007), and his novels, The
Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998), Annie Dunne (2002), and most
recently A Long Long Way (2005), which was the Dublin: One City One
Book choice for 2007 and was shortlisted for the Man Booker and the
Dublin International Impac Prize. He has won among other awards the
Irish-America Fund Literary Award, The Christopher Ewart-Biggs Prize,
the London Critics Circle Award, and The Kerry Group Irish Fiction
Prize. He lives in Wicklow with his wife Ali and three children,
Merlin, Coral and Tobias.
