Sebastian Barry Books in Order

Retired Dublin detective Tom Kettle lives quietly by the sea until former colleagues ask him to revisit a long closed case involving an abusive priest, forcing him to confront buried memories of institutional violence, family tragedy and his own complicity.

Drawn from his tenure as Laureate for Irish Fiction, these three lectures see Barry reflecting on his childhood in Dublin, the family stories behind characters like Thomas Dunne and the McNultys, and the fragile, sustaining work of writing itself.

Narrated by Winona, a young Lakota woman adopted by Thomas McNulty and John Cole in Reconstruction era Tennessee, this sequel to Days Without End follows her search for justice after a brutal assault and her struggle to claim a name, a land and a future.

Two men serving life sentences in Dublin's Mountjoy Prison share a cramped cell yet never speak directly, their intertwining monologues slowly revealing the crime, betrayals and moments of grace that bind them together.

Irish emigrant Thomas McNulty flees famine and finds a makeshift life in 1850s America, first dancing in dresses for lonely miners, then fighting through the Indian Wars and Civil War alongside his lover John Cole, as the pair build an unlikely family.

This book pairs two plays, in Whistling Psyche, Florence Nightingale and the mysterious Dr Barry share a night in a railway waiting room that exposes hidden identities and ideals, while Fred and Jane offers a quieter study of ageing, compromise and regret.

Jack McNulty, an Irish temporary gentleman whose officer's rank in the British Army was never secure, sits alone in 1950s Ghana writing the story of his life, from youthful ambition and marriage to Mai Kirwan to the drinking and gambling that destroyed them both.

Hans Christian Andersen arrives at Charles Dickens's Kent home as an awkward houseguest, dazzled by the family's charm yet blind to their tensions, and over one unsettled summer his presence magnifies jealousy, ambition and the cracks in Dickens's marriage.

Eighty nine year old Lilly Bere looks back on a life reshaped by the Irish War of Independence, flight to America and decades of work and loss, tracing how exile, violence and brief happiness have marked her family from Dublin to Chicago and beyond.

On a remote Irish farm, solitary farmer Nicholas Farquhar is visited by a younger neighbour seeking advice, a meeting that stirs ghosts, buried guilt and a chain of events far beyond his control in this atmospheric, memory haunted play.

Roseanne McNulty, nearing one hundred in a crumbling mental hospital, secretly writes the story of her life while her psychiatrist investigates her past, and their clashing accounts uncover a buried record of desire, betrayal and religious zeal in mid century Sligo.

From his grave in Canterbury Cathedral, Elizabethan actor Dallas Sweetman is summoned to justify his life, recounting a tale of love, jealousy, miracles and divided loyalties between Protestants and Catholics as he pleads his case before an unseen court.

Told through alternating monologues, this play charts ten bruising years in the lives of inner city Dublin couple Janet and Joe, from first love through domestic violence, grief and addiction, asking whether tenderness can survive after unforgivable acts.

Willie Dunne is a young Dubliner who joins the Royal Dublin Fusiliers in 1914, hoping to please his policeman father. On the Western Front and during the Easter Rising, he learns how war and Irish politics can tear a family apart.

A later collection of poems in which Barry turns his eye to childhood, faith, illness and family, using spare, luminous language to chart small acts of love and the strange, sometimes unsettling textures of the everyday.

Set in the home of retired leader Johnny Silvester, this political play follows a long night as a history student's interview peels back layers of charm, corruption and betrayal, exposing the personal cost of power in modern Irish public life.

Unmarried Annie Dunne shares a small Wicklow farm with her cousin Sarah in the late 1950s, finding unexpected joy when two young relatives come to stay, even as courtship, money worries and social change threaten the fragile refuge she has made.

Branded a traitor after joining the Royal Irish Constabulary, gentle Sligo man Eneas McNulty is sentenced to death by former friends and spends his life wandering the world, torn between the pull of home and the danger that waits there.

From a 1950s Dublin hospital bed, dying alcoholic Mai O'Hara relives her glamorous youth in Sligo, a stormy marriage to Jack and the losses that followed Irish independence, as morphine blurred memories mix love, bitterness and a vanished middle class world.

This volume gathers three plays, the story of music hall performer Lizzie Finn facing class prejudice, the haunted reminiscences of ex policeman Thomas Dunne, and an Irishman's outlaw life in the American South, each exploring exile, love and the weight of history.

In a county home in 1930s Wicklow, former Dublin Metropolitan Police chief Thomas Dunne drifts between lucidity and memory, reliving his service under the British crown and the shattering cost that Ireland's revolution and his own choices have exacted on his family.

This volume brings together two early plays, a quiet drama about a dwindling religious community on Sherkin Island, and the story of ageing brothers on a Cork Kerry hill farm whose fantasies of escape collide with loneliness and decline.

A sequence of interlinked stories centres on Moran, a wanderer born in a Sligo poorhouse, whose travels through Europe and America trace questions of poverty, faith and belonging in the long shadow of Ireland's past.

A slim poetry collection whose precise, image rich lyrics circle around city streets, domestic rooms and the Irish countryside, catching fleeting moods and memories in quick, carefully drawn snapshots.

An anthology of younger poets from the Republic of Ireland, edited and introduced by Barry, bringing together diverse voices born in the 1950s and highlighting a rich southern tradition often overshadowed by writers from the North.

A twelve year old boy steps through a doorway into the otherworldly realm of Elsewhere, where strange landscapes and encounters test his courage, loyalty and imagination in a sequence of fantastical adventures written for younger readers.

This withdrawn volume pairs two novellas, one about a loveless marriage in the west of Ireland in the 1930s, the other about a young man drawn into a suffocating affair with a woman named Lena, both probing desire, shame and moral compromise.

Barry's first poetry collection offers small, carefully shaded poems that linger on family, memory and the Irish landscape, like watercolours catching brief shifts of light and feeling.

Barry's debut novel, set in Ireland, follows a small circle of characters whose ordinary lives are unsettled by private disappointments and quiet political rumblings, already showing his gift for intimate detail and the slow drift of history into family life.