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Sep 17, 2026
Celebrated Booker Prize-nominated Irish novelist Sebastian Barry, “one of the best writers in the English language” (The Washington Post), joins Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole onstage for the launch of his new novel, The Newer World.
Set in the turbulent years after the Civil War, The Newer World follows Tennyson Bouguereau, a young man born into slavery in Union-leaning northwest Tennessee, working the tobacco fields of a small farm, avoiding any action that might drive his pro-Confederate neighbors to the kind of unprovoked violence that killed his mother. But when a gang of defeated rebels descend on his farm, his choice to defend it and the people within makes Tennyson a wanted man. Forced to flee the only home he has known, he embarks on an extraordinary journey across a nation struggling to reinvent itself. Traveling from Nashville to army camps in the American West, he encounters a country still haunted by the wounds of war, where freedom remains fragile and survival demands both courage and imagination.
Returning to the beloved characters from Barry’s award-winning novels Days Without End and A Thousand Moons, The Newer World is at once intimate and expansive — a profound meditation on emancipation, displacement, and the possibility of beginning again. How does the grand sweep history operate in the lives of ordinary people? How can lyrical, dreamlike fiction capture the contours of reality with such precision? What made one of the great Irish novelists of our time so enraptured with American history? Hear Barry and O’Toole discuss the origins of his new novel and a growing fictional universe that is “filled with life, quiet truth and exquisite intimacy … fully alert to the power and irony of history” (Colm Tóibín).
“Nobody writes like, nobody takes risks like, nobody pushes the language, and the heart, and the two together, quite like Sebastian Barry does.” — Ali Smith
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