Laureate for Irish Fiction 2018-2021, his novels have twice won the Costa Book of the Year award, the Independent Booksellers Award and the Walter Scott Prize. They confound her, too; they play strange games that aren't altogether innocent, and their impulsiveness disrupts Annie and Sarah's spartan routine.

Barry has a way of making you feel like you are sitting off to the edge of a scene, experiencing it with all your senses.

Annie’s sister Maud took ill and Annie went to help Maud’s husband Matt in raising their 3 sons and looking after their home. A summer of adventure pain delight and ultimately epiphany unfolds for both the children and their elderly caretakers in this poignant and exquisitely told story of innocence loss and reconciliation.

In a triumphant moment, Charlie and Tinsel and Charlie's girlfriend, Louise, sabotage a movie set largely because the picture has an ''astronomical budget'' and is bound to be no good. What is this growing old, when even the engine that holds our despair and hope in balance begins to fail us. Irish playwright and novelist Barry's gift for image and metaphor ( The Whereabouts of Aneas McNulty) are equaled here by his eye for descriptive detail.I think Sebastian Barry was unlucky not to have won the Booker that year, but I did so enjoy the winner, John Banville’s The Sea. Tony Mastrogiorgio for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote the book was a "superb new novel" although says there "was there is a brief flickering of regret at first impressions" he says "that brief doubt is replaced by what can only be described as wonder. That makes it suffused with melancholy as she contemplates past disappointments and the fragility of her position.

This reads like a poetic love letter to Ireland, to all the men and women, like Annie, left behind by a changing world, the difficulties of accepting that life is a work in progress, always changing.

But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. The wind goes on with its counting of the leaves in the sycamores, a hundred and one, a hundred and two. If you want to experience something of what life was like living and eking out a tiny agricultural living in long-ago 1950s Ireland, read this evocative book. It was only later that I discovered that the little boy in the book is the real Sebastian Barry and Annie is his real aunt. Annie Dunne, ανύπαντρη και άτεκνη, ζούσε στο σπίτι της αδερφής της και βοηθούσε στην ανατροφή των τριών παιδιών τους.

It really is lovely, though, and the next time Bethany and I decide that we want to pick out books for each other to read, I think I’m going to have her read this one. There she had been an unpaid housekeeper, nanny and general dogsbody; with no means of her own, and having failed to find accommodation with any of her other relatives, in desperation she had written to Sarah to ask her if she could help her on the farm? Lyrical and moving without being overly sentimental, Barry let's the reader become immersed in the life of Annie Dunne, experiencing the hardships and the brief moments of joy with the same rhthym as you imagine her life on the farm being, languid and prosaic.I thought "A Long Long Way" should have won the BOoker Prize a few years ago -- it was shortlisted but I thought it was better than the novel that won. And it is that dichotomy between what Annie feels inside and the way her actions are interpreted by others which provides the tension — and the heart-breaking emotion — that makes this novel a truly special one. Initially, the arrival of the two children, a six-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy, worried Annie. And somehow, because Barry captures the minutiae of daily life so eloquently, the story sings in such a way you want to keep reading.