Tag: historical fiction

Book Review – The Newer World by Sebastian Barry @FaberBooks

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About the Book

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.

Format: Hardback (272 pages) Publisher: Faber & Faber
Publication date: 10th September 2026 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

In The Newer World Sebastian Barry returns to the characters who first appeared in Days Without End, which won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2017, and its sequel, A Thousand Moons.

Days Without End told the story of Thomas McNulty and John Cole, whilst A Thousand Moons continued their story but from the point of view of Winona, the orphaned Indian girl they adopted. Our narrator in this book is the wonderfully named Tennyson Bouguereau, a freed man living with his twin sister Rosalee on a small Tennessee farm owned by Lige Magan. Also living there now are Thomas and John, who both served with Lige in the army, and their daughter Winona. Although The Newer World can be read as a standalone it does overlap with events in the earlier books. Personally, I found myself wishing I’d had time to reread the first two books before reading this one to refresh my memory about how they intersect.

In Tennyson Bouguereau, the author has once again created a distinctive and unforgettable narrative voice. As he sets out to recount the story of his life, he warns, ‘I’m not going to tell you just a pretty story. I will give you the actual matters.’ So we learn of his tragic family history, the cruelty endured by enslaved people and that being freed doesn’t bring an end to hatred, bigotry and violence. That deference remains a way to divert attention from yourself, although even that is not necessarily a guarantee of safety, as he discovers.

Following the outcome of a violent attack on the farm, Tennyson is forced to flee for his life. He receives a lifeline from an enlightened lawyer in the form of a place at a college for black freedmen and women in Nashville. There he meets George, a fellow student and ex-soldier who takes Tennyson under his wing. He also meets a young woman, Minnie, who captures his heart. As members of the college’s choir Tennyson, George and Minnie travel the country performing the songs sung in the fields by slaves. Eventually the choir travels to England where audiences greet their performances with acclaim rather than the hostility they experience in America.

‘Then noise, noise never heard before, not just like that, those held-in lungs now filled again with air, everywhere arms were raised, human persons embracing, now one hat thrown into the air, now a hundred, now a thousand, a stampede of cries, the hats turning in the half-darkness and seeming to float in those weird new seconds without clocks, such shouts thrown upward after them, wild sparks of freedom, a brimming fire of joy.’

Tennyson’s friendship with George will last for decades and inform many of Tennyson’s life choices. Together they share many experiences, both good and bad.

Tennyson’s life is one shaped by external events which on many occasions leave him feeling adrift. Rosalee’s letters are infrequent and because of his itinerant lifestyle he often learns of events long after they have taken place. He aches to return to the farm and to Rosalee, but is fearful of the consequences. Even if he does make it back what will he find? In fact, is there such a thing as ‘home’ for him anymore?

I was completely absorbed by Tennyson’s story. I really loved the sense of a man looking back on his life and reflecting on both the good and the bad points with insight and a degree of equanimity.

‘No one admires an old man – an old man is for the muckheap. But, granting that, there isn’t a living child that will not be old by and by. It’s the by and by that confounds you, how quick that comes. And all the things that bothered you and hampered your gait when you were young, they begin to seem like vanished riches. […] We have got our sole legend, our passage through, our mark we left on the path, where we stubbed our toes, where we broke things off. So I guess that’s old man’s riches, what he has got anyhow.’

It’s possible The Newer World is a finale to the trilogy and, if so, it’s a fitting one that has immersed the reader in the lives of very different characters. However, there’s enough in the final pages to make me think the story needn’t necessarily end here.

I received an advance reader copy courtesy of Faber & Faber via NetGalley.

In three words: Powerful, moving, evocative

About the Author

Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. The 2018-2021 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. (Photo: Publisher author page)

Book Review – A Thought Without Collision by Adrian Duncan

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About the Book

Summer, 1923. Six-year-old Catherine Carolan grows restless on her parents’ farm. It’s already clear that her intellect will soon outgrow the two-room schoolhouse across the fields. But in post-Civil War Ireland, an education is not an easy thing for a girl to access, and young Catherine is not the only one in her family who will come to tire of rural life.

Summer, 1951. To ease him through his final days, Dr. Josef Alois calls for someone from his past. Enter Catherine Carolan, now an Oxford professor. As Alois’s mind and body falter, Catherine must decide how far she will follow this man that she loves.

Format: Paperback (224 pages) Publisher: Tuskar Rock
Publication date: 13th August 2026 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

The book’s opening chapter positions this as a novel in two strands. The analogy used is that of a piano keyboard with the starting point as middle C and your right hand striking ascending notes and your left hand striking descending notes, alternately. (It probably helps if you’re familiar with a piano keyboard.)

The ‘ascending’ strand follows Catherine from the age of six growing up on her parents’ farm in rural Ireland. Her schoolteacher, Master Francis, quickly recognises she possesses extraordinary mathematical ability far beyond her years. Guiding her through increasingly complex concepts provides him with a sense of fulfilment, something lacking in his interactions with his other pupils many of whom struggle with simple tasks of reading and writing. As we discover, Catherine perceives numbers not just as things to be used to solve equations or calculations, but as objects that can possess different properties. Exploring such concepts will set the direction of her future academic career.

Catherine’s early years immerses the reader in the life of a rural Irish village, introducing some fascinating characters. As in the author’s previous book, The Geometer Lobachevsky, many of these possess obsessional traits. Austin, a local photographer, dreams of building a golf course (as it happens on the land currently owned by Catherine’s family) and has spent time drawing a design in meticulous detail, including calculations of degree of difficulty based on each hole’s topography, length and the effect of prevailing winds. It’s sight of this map that first prompts Catherine’s thoughts about the properties of numbers.

The descending strand takes place thirty years later and focuses on Catherine’s former university mentor, Dr. Josef Alois, as he lives out what we know to be the final weeks of his life in a house he built himself in a remote part of Scotland. ‘This man is more unwell than he believes and will perish in one month and eleven days.’ Alois’s story is one of mental and physical decline whereas Catherine’s story has been of intellectual progress and achievement.

Their relationship is based on shared intellectual curiosity about subjects such as mathematical probability, philosophy, logic and linguistics. Also by the nights they spent together in air raid shelters during the Blitz. Briefly perhaps there was the possibility their relationship may have moved beyond friendship, on Catherine’s part at least. For Alois, it’s more a case of admiration for Catherine’s exceptional intellect. Their bond remains strong enough that Catherine travels to Alois’s home to care for him through his illness. There are moving moments as Alois becomes frailer and less and less able to communicate his wishes clearly. The remote location of the house means there’s a claustrophobic feel to this strand of the story.

Catherine is a mathematical prodigy. I am not. This is where I struggled because many of the mathematical concepts went over my head and I found myself skipping sections that were just too abstruse. I think this prevented me forming a stronger connection with the story. Although I admired the wonderful writing, I was left with the feeling I was not quite clever enough to appreciate everything the author was trying to convey.

You can read an interview with Adrian about the book here which I found gave me a little more insight into its themes and inspiration.

In three words: Complex, intimate, elusive

About the Author

Adrian Duncan is an Irish artist and writer. His us the author of Love Notes from a German Building Site, which won the John McGahern Book Prize, A Sabbatical in Leipzig, The Geometer Lobachevsky, which was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize, and The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth. (Photo: Publisher author page)

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