McNulty Family Books in Order

The McNulty Family books follow another branch of Sebastian Barry's invented kin, centred on a Sligo family whose members are repeatedly caught on the wrong side of Irish history. The trilogy is not numbered within the stories, but the books loosely build from one to the next, revealing new angles on the same tangled past.

The natural starting point is The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty. Eneas grows up in Sligo in the early years of the twentieth century, a gentle, dutiful boy who joins the British Merchant Navy and then, back home after the First World War, the Royal Irish Constabulary. That choice brands him a traitor in the eyes of republican neighbours. When he refuses to become an assassin to clear his name, he is given a death sentence by former friends and forced into a lifetime of wandering far from home.

In The Secret Scripture the focus moves to Roseanne McNulty, Eneas's sister in law and one of Barry's most memorable narrators. An elderly patient in a soon to be closed mental hospital in Roscommon, she secretly writes her own account of how she came to be incarcerated, while her psychiatrist keeps his own notes. Between their two testimonies a different, darker history of mid century Ireland appears, with Roseanne's marriage into the McNulty family and the zeal of a local priest playing a central part.

The Temporary Gentleman steps into the life of Jack McNulty, Eneas's younger brother. Sitting alone in lodgings in Accra in the late 1950s, he begins to write the story of his life as a so called temporary gentleman, an Irishman whose officer's rank in the British Army was never secure. His memories travel back to Sligo in the 1920s, his courtship of the brilliant Mai Kirwan, and the drinking, gambling and self deception that slowly wrecked their marriage.

Across the trilogy Barry returns to the same streets, institutions and weather in Sligo, but the moral centre keeps shifting. Eneas is outwardly innocent yet marked as guilty, Roseanne has been treated as dangerous when she was in many ways powerless, and Jack is both wronged and the author of terrible damage. Threads from the Dunne family novels and from the later American books are woven through, so that names like McNulty and Dunne feel like branches of one larger clan.

Taken together, the McNulty Family books offer a sideways history of twentieth century Ireland, told through exile, institutionalisation and self exile. They are rich in recurring motifs, but you can comfortably read each novel on its own, or return to them in any order to notice new connections.