Saturday, March 23, 2013

The Secret Scripture: Sebastian Barry


A wonderful book.  Roseanne McNulty, 100 years old, is a long-term patient of Roscommon Mental Hospital. She's Doctor Grene's patient.  Secretly, she starts to record her memories, shifting, uncertain, lyrically expressed.  Doctor Grene, whose own life is difficult, has access to a different version of her life story, and she does not confide her own to him.  Hers was a life lived against a background of civil war and religious intolerance, of poverty, and the mental illness of her mother.  Though many of her memories are bleak, Roseanne herself is warm, often funny, always sympathetic.  Dr. Grene's losses and hurts are woven into the narrative, and at the end, his history, and that of Roseanne are interlinked in a most surprising way.  This is a beautifully written and tragic novel about damaged but utterly sympathetic characters.

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