Sebastian Barry is a playwright whose work has been produced in London, Dublin, Sydney, and New York.
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I called my dad up and said, "This magazine wants to send us to Vietnam. Do you want to go?" And he thought about for a minute, and said, "Yeah, I'll go." ... Just the well of emotion that being there with him brought up, I thought, this has to be my next book.
Two people's stories tell a single tale, in Irish playwright and novelist Sebastian Barry's book "The Secret Scripture." A 100-year-old mental patient named Roseanne McNulty has been penning her autobiography, while her psychiatrist, an enigmatic man named Dr. Grene, is keeping a journal of his own. Together their narratives form what Publishers Weekly called "both a sparkling literary puzzle and a stark cautionary tale of corrupted power."