The Secret Scripture
By Sebastian Barry
Faber & Faber £16.99, 300 pages
FT Bookshop price: £13.59

The last book I gave my father before he died was Sebastian Barry’s majestic novel, A Long Long Way. He read it avidly, remarking to me one day that the language in it was pretty strong. My response was that strong language was needed for such strong subject matter (the first world war and the Easter Rising). In Barry’s new novel the subject matter is the painful history of the emergent Irish Republic, with particular focus on “the savage fairytale of life in Ireland in the 20s and 30s”, and how this could blight individual lives.