Current reading

Wednesday
My current read is the 2008 novel by Irish writer Sebastian Barry. "Roseanne McNulty, forgotten centenarian, long-time resident of the Roscommon regional mental hospital, is facing an imminent upheaval. The decrepit Victorian institution is soon to be demolished, leaving its residents displaced in a starkly changed modern Ireland....Attempting to organise her memories, some reliable, others shifting, she embarks on the writing of a chronicle". Her testimony "interweaves with that of her psychiatrist, Dr Grene. A man who feels fatherly, "even motherly", towards his patients, he is plagued by memories of an uneasy marriage. He and his late wife were "like two peoples that have once committed grave crimes against each other, but in another generation." The book was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, narrowly losing to The White Tiger.