Paperback writers

By Sebastian Barry

Faber,€10

The Temporary Gentleman opens in Accra, Ghana, in 1957, where Jack – a character based on Sebastian Barry’s maternal grandfather – has been working as a UN observer. But as Jack sits down to write about his life in an old minute-book of the Gold Coast Engineering and Bridge Company, he is drawn back to Ireland, and to the history of his passionate, painful marriage to Mai, the ...