Sebastian Barry for The Newer World

Sebastian Barry was the 2018-21 Laureate for Irish Fiction. His novels have twice won the Costa Book of the Year award, the Independent Booksellers Award and the Walter Scott Prize.

He had two consecutive novels shortlisted for the Booker Prize, A Long Long Way and the top ten bestseller The Secret Scripture, 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.

He joins us for The Newer World, an immersive and unforgettable novel of one man's life in the aftermath of the American Civil War.

I knew as I made my way home that there was no home. All the old things . . . were gone forever.

Against this rapidly shifting landscape, Tennyson Bouguereau - freed man, devoted brother, nascent singer, conflicted soldier and wanted man - journeys to find meaning and belonging. From the relative safety of home in Tennessee with his sister Rosalee, he is offered the possibility of a whole new life in Nashville, until a surprising trip to Victorian England changes everything.

Exquisitely rendered, and with a rich cast of characters, The Newer World is a lyrical, visceral novel about what it is to survive, and what might be lost along the way.

'A masterly work of historical witness and moral reckoning' OBSERVER