FROM THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF DAYS WITHOUT END AND OLD GOD'S TIME
'A masterly work of historical witness and moral reckoning' OBSERVER
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 the rapidly shifting landscape of post Civil War America, 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.
There's a beautiful looseness to the novel, almost a wildness, the mark of a true, natural storyteller. It's easily among his best works
KEVIN BARRY
The Newer World is that rare entity: a novel that rises to meet its political moment
CLAIRE KILROY
Another novel full of exquisite prose amid the horrors of war. As long as Sebastian Barry continues to write, I will be first in line to read his work. Beauty and devastation live side by side in his wonderful fiction
LIZ NUGENT
Barry records a life between worlds, in tender, elegiac prose. This is the novelist at his best: a masterly work of historical witness and moral reckoning.
OBSERVER (Fiction to look out for in '26)
A novel you settle into with a feeling of deep satisfaction, knowing you're in the company of a master
BENJAMIN WOOD
Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. 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 Man Booker Prize, A Long Long Way (2005) and the top ten bestseller The Secret Scripture (2008), 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 lives in County Wicklow.
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.
