Synopsis from The Guardian:
There are two first-person narrative voices in Sebastian Barry’s new novel, The Secret Scripture, and both of them are trying, in their different ways, to make sense of the past – their own and their country’s. The first, and most moving, belongs to Roseanne, an Irish woman who is 100 and who has spent most of her adult life in the Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital, which is just about to be closed down. Throughout her confinement, Roseanne has written her life story, the ‘secret scripture’ of the book’s title, a clandestine act of testimony and reclamation. ‘I am completely alone,’ she says, early on. ‘There is no one in the world that knows me outside of this place… I am only a thing left over, a remnant woman…’
