Sebastian Barry

On Canaan’s Side has just been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. As Lilly Bere mourns the loss of her beloved grandson Bill she thinks back to her forced evacuation from Barry’s home town of Dublin to the dangerous, hope-filled world of America at the end of the First World War. As she struggles to come to terms with her bereavement, she tries to make sense of her sorrow and remembers the lives she has touched over the seven decades of her life.

An epic but intimate novel, Barry’s perfectly pitched prose paints an engrossing world of war, devastation and love.