The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry

Anyway, this one is set, to make it that bit bleaker, in a loony bin in the west of Ireland which is about to be demolished and the inmates sent into the community if sane, and if clinically mad, consigned to its modern, hygienic successor. In a wing of the ramshackle old asylum, there is a very old lady, Roseanne, generally thought to be 100, who is writing her memoirs, unbeknown to everyone, and squirrelling them away underneath a floorboard when she hears someone coming. "No one knows I have a story," she writes. "Next year, next week, tomorrow, I will no doubt be gone, and it will be a smallsize coffin they will need for me, and a narrow hole. There will never be a stone at my head, and no matter. But small and narrow are all human things maybe." Now you may well be thinking that this is not how normal people, centenarians or otherwise, express themselves.

It's how writers write. But I'm not sure you would be right. I knew a houseful of sisters in Ireland who would have been contemporaneous with this old lady and, poor as they were, they expressed themselves with quite startling grace and clarity.

Anyway, to cut to the chase, the old lady's narrative of her youth and the misfortunes that brought her to the asylum alternate with that of the asylum's resident psychiatrist, a Dr Grene. He has the job of assessing the patients, to establish whether or not they should be consigned to the community. And he finds himself spending ever greater amounts of time with the old lady, perhaps because of his own domestic misfortunes, which he describes at intervals between his encounters with his ancient patient, who was, it seems, once a great beauty. The stories of the two alternate, and finally converge.

The old lady's account is not just of herself but effectively of Ireland from the civil war to the Second World War. Indeed, the psychiatrist more or less takes the trouble to point out the obvious metaphor, that Ireland itself was something of a basket case during the period in question.

It's narrated from an off beat perspective, that of a workingclass Presbyterian — so, not part of the general Catholic community, but also not part of the Protestant establishment.

Roseanne's story of her father's precarious existence as a gravedigger, then ratcatcher, describes the elements of existence that transcend poverty — her father was fond of singing operettas — and the ways in which that poverty can break the human spirit. The malign elements of this story are provided by the savagery of the civil war and the coldly repressive influence of the local priest. (His problem: repressed sexuality. Obviously.) Religion and politics don't come out of this one well — the author's prejudices are easy to read.

And although the narrative never gets far beyond the Sligo of Roseanne's youth, its reach is considerable. Like Pilate, Sebastian Barry more or less asks, What is truth? and concludes it's very much in the mind of the individual.

So, if beautiful and bleak is what the Booker judges are after next year, Mr Barry is your man.

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

Nearing her one-hundredth birthday, Roseanne McNulty faces an uncertain future, as the Roscommon Regional Mental hospital where she's spent the best part of her adult life prepares for closure. Over the weeks leading up to this upheaval, she talks often with her psychiatrist Dr Grene, and their relationship intensifies and complicates. Told through their respective journals, the story that emerges is at once shocking and deeply beautiful. Refracted through the haze of memory and retelling, Roseanne's story becomes an alternative, secret history of Ireland's changing character and the story of a life blighted by terrible mistreatment and ignorance, and yet marked still by love and passion and hope.