Living by the sea in the Hamptons on Long Island, Lilly Dunne, the narrator of Sebastian Barry‘s new novel, recollects her life from the vantage point of her late eighties. When she takes up her pen to record what she later calls “her confession”, Lilly has just lost her grandson, who committed suicide his return from the first Gulf war.

Many decades before, when still a young woman, Lilly was forced to flee Ireland; her fiancé was a member of the Black and Tans, the widely hated special force used to suppress revolution in Ireland in the early 1920s, and her father was chief superintendent of B division in Dublin Metropolitan Police – “a policeman of the old British regime” as Lilly says, and consequently”an enemy of the new Ireland”.

This is a family that bears the scars of many of the twentieth century’s most bloody conflicts, from the first world war to the war in Iraq. It’s also a family that Barry has written about before – in A Long Long Way, Lilly’s brother Willie Dunne goes off to fight in the Great War at the age of eighteen. And her sister Annie Dunne was the subject of a later eponymous novel.

“You could tell that there was traumatic debris in all of them…” Sebastian tells me in this interview, talking of his own family, on whom several of his characters are based, “you could just tell their roots were in chaos and turmoil.”

To listen to my interview with Sebastian Barry, click here [30:44].

And to hear him read a short extract from the book, click here [1:21].