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On Canaan's Side Hardcover – August 4, 2011

by Sebastian Barry (Author)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 956 ratings
Editors' pick Best Literature & Fiction
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Longlisted for the Booker Prize, a mesmerizing new novel from the award-winning author of Old God's Time

A first-person narrative of Lilly Bere’s life, On Canaan’s Side opens as the eighty-five-year-old Irish émigré mourns the loss of her grandson, Bill. Lilly, the daughter of a Dublin policeman, revisits her eventful past, going back to the moment she was forced to flee Ireland at the end of the First World War. She continues her tale in America, where—far from her family—she first tastes the sweetness of love and the bitterness of betrayal.

Spanning nearly seven decades, Sebastian Barry’s extraordinary fifth novel explores memory, war, family ties, love, and loss, distilling the complexity and beauty of life into his haunting prose.
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  1. Book 3 of 3
    Dunne Family
  2. Print length
    256 pages
  3. Language
    English
  4. Publisher
    Viking
  5. Publication date
    August 4, 2011
  6. Dimensions
    6.34 x 0.98 x 9.45 inches
  7. ISBN-10
    0571226531
  8. ISBN-13
    978-0571226535
  9. See all details
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Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Viking; American First edition (August 4, 2011)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0571226531
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0571226535
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.07 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.34 x 0.98 x 9.45 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 956 ratings

About the authors

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  1. Sebastian Barry

    Sebastian Barry

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    Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. Laureate for Irish Fiction 2018-2021, his novels have twice won the Costa Book of the Year award, the Independent Booksellers Award and the Walter Scott Prize. He had two consecutive novels shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, A Long Long Way (2005) and the top ten bestseller The Secret Scripture (2008), and has also won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize, the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and others. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin. He lives in County Wicklow.

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  2. Sebastian Barry

    Sebastian Barry

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Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
956 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

gammyjill
5.0 out of 5 stars When the sins of the Old World follow us to the New..
Reviewed in the United States on September 10, 2011
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Sebastian Barry's novel, "On Canaan's Side" is a beautifully written story about how love and loss follow us all through life. Changing location, setting sail and fleeing from the troubles on one shore, does not always resolve those problems. While, on the other hand, even if we have to leave a place where we have loved ones, we don't leave those bonds of love behind.

Lilly Bere looks back on her long life in the early 1990's when she receives word of her beloved grandson's suicide after returning home from the first Gulf War. Lilly, an immigrant from Ireland in the early 1920's who fled to the US with her fiance because of threats to him from members of the IRA. However, tragedy in the form of a political assassination follows Lilly and Tadg to Chicago when Tadg is gunned down in public. Lilly flees to Cleveland, where she goes into domestic service and meets the man who becomes her husband and who fathers a son with her. Her son, Ed, is born to the newly-single Lilly after her husband is reported missing and presumed dead in an accident. The rest of Lilly's life is devoted to raising her son by continuing in domestic service in the employ of a Kennedy-like family. Ed sees duty in the Vietnam War, and contributes another generation to Lilly's line with his son, who he turns over to Lilly to raise. It is this grandson's - Bill's - death who Lilly is mourning when the book opens.

Lilly Bere has lost much in her 89 years of life. Her mother died at Lilly's birth, and her beloved older brother, Willie, died in the fields of Picardy in WW1. Her father, a Dublin policeman, sends Tadg and her off to supposed safely in the United States, but, of course, Lilly loses Tadg. Sebastian Barry writes with great tenderness and tact about how the ties that bind us with one another are expandable and can remain with us even after our loved one's earthly presence has gone. "Canaan" is a relatively short book, but the wisdom contained in its pages is astounding. An excellent novel.
9 people found this helpful
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Catherine Lavercombe
4.0 out of 5 stars A good read
Reviewed in the United States on May 26, 2013
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This is another excellent novel by Seastian Barry. He has used the same device as in The Secretic Scripture and has written it from the main characters point of view, a woman. The story starts with Lily writing about her life after the tragic suicide of her beloved grandson,Bill. Lily recounts her young life in Ireland after her mother died in childbirth. Her brother was killed in WW1 and there seems to be a pall over the family. When Lily becomes a friend if Tadg she is mixed up in the hatred of the Black and Tans of which Tadg is a member. A price is put on their heads and they flee by ship to the United States. They are not able to avoiud the IRA though and Tadg is murdered. Lily is helped then by a succession of people the first being Cassie, a black maid who takes her under her wing and gets her a job. She marries then but is unaware that her husband is a black man, he has light skin and is always trying to clean the colour from his face. He leaves Lilly while she is expecting their child and Lilly fdoes not find out till much later when she meets him in the street with his new family of these curious circumstances. Lilly is helped along the way by many people, including Mrs Wolohan and Mr Nolan. Lilly's son Ed never knows of his fathers heritage and that is a failing on Lilly's part as it may helped her troubled son. Her grandson though is the love of her life and she is devastated when he commits suicide. It appears he like his father is greatly affected by war. There is a twist at the end as in the Secret Scripture but I won't spoil that for you. Overall a very entertaining novel whch brought up a lot of discussion points in our Book Club. Thwe writing and descriptions are excellent and it is a very good read.
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Ringelevio
5.0 out of 5 stars Extraordinary Book!
Reviewed in the United States on May 25, 2023
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This book, and its writer Sebastian Barry, are utterly extraordinary. There is a music to the writing, a cadence, a love of language all its own. The Irish have many great writers, and Barry belongs in the Pantheon. In addition to a compeling story, lush with memory and detail, there is another word that I have never used to descibe a book: Intimate. Perhaps because it is told from a first-person POV, but the level of intimacy is spellbinding. There is a scene towards the end of the book that is shocking in its emotional honesty. This is the fourth book of Barry's I have read, and plan to keep going.

It is a great book. Bravo!
3 people found this helpful
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Mark Town
5.0 out of 5 stars Will reward your attention
Reviewed in the United States on October 3, 2011
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This is a beautiful novel. I notice it is not getting particularly respectful attention from book reviewers in the major publications, although the notices it does receive - such as in the NY Times Book Review of October 2, 2011 - are favorable. I wonder why, and can only surmise that the novel is in between genres in a way. It is first and foremost a story. A lyrically told story. It is supremely well crafted, and certainly rewards a slow reading. Some of it - especially the ending - reads more like poetry, but not of the sort that slows the story down or fogs it up at all. If it has a fault it might be that the characters are not fully developed, their interior lives are revealed mostly through action. The main character is also perhaps a little underdeveloped in terms of interior life.

But why quibble...it is a great story and the writing is gorgeous. It is engaging and illuminating. Engaging - you do indeed want to know what happened (the action has all occured in the past and is being relived by an older woman at the end of her life) and why. Illuminating because it ties historical drama into personal drama very effectively.

It is an anti-war novel. It questions stridency, zealousness, and ideological purity - and gives an accounting of the costs of same. The men are walking wounded from various wars fought on distant or not so-distant shores and still fight the interior wars that result from procesing it all.

I have read a previous novel by Barry, "A Long, Long Way," also very powerful, which shares some of the same ground and characters as "On Canaan's Side." I look forward to reading Annie Dunne and the others that mine the same territory.
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Top reviews from other countries

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Iribree
4.0 out of 5 stars très beau roman
Reviewed in France on January 22, 2014
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Dès qu'on rentre dans cette histoire et qu'on suit les personnages on ne peut plus les quitter. Très beau roman.
2 people found this helpful
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ARCubitt
5.0 out of 5 stars Exiled in the Promised Land
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 17, 2012
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Written in the first person, On Canaan's Side tells the story of Lilly Bere, the 89 year old narrator and protagonist who has had to live her life in exile and under the radar in the US.

Lilly's story brings to life one of the most turbulent times in Irish history, when political divisions meant that many caught up in the conflict after the first world war, were either forced into exile or killed. Lilly's story has some parallels with that of my own Irish grandmother's, who, luckily for her, left Ireland not long after the end of the first war, and before the bloodshed and deep political divisions, prior to the creation of the Irish Free State, forced some, like Lilly, to flee in fear of their lives.
Lilly's crime was to fall in love with Tadg Bere, who on returning from the First World War, chose to work as an auxiliary police officer for the oppressors, the hated Black and Tans. When Tadg's name appears on a hit-list he and Lily run from Dublin to America and head for Chicago. Perhaps, with hindsight they should have chosen to go west, rather than east, and certainly not to a city already full of immigrants from Ireland and supporters for the other side of the political divide.

Rather than add in some plot spoilers at this juncture, suffice to say that Lilly is a survivor and despite the seemingly endless dreadful blows that life deals her, she not only endures but, even manages to enjoy her life with quiet stoicism. Lilly takes pride in her work as a cook and is admired and appreciated by her employer.

Sebastian Barry writes haunting, poetic and achingly beautiful prose. His characterisation of an elderly Irish woman is utterly convincing. When I finished the book I felt bereft. As I have come late to Barry's work and now know that these characters appear in not just an earlier novel but in his earlier plays, I can't wait to reconnect with them.
4 people found this helpful
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R. Chipperfield
4.0 out of 5 stars A Poem, actually.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 7, 2013
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Saying that 'On Canaan's Side' isn't Barry's best still means that it's almost superb. Who can he be compared to? But the piling up of sorrows and miseries is hard to take, and towards the end I felt that the exposure of Mr Nolan's life and his death were more than enough grief in one story. So many people in the book were tidied up by death. The last jigsaw piece was Mr Nolan being clicked into place. Then Lilly had no more loved ones to lose, so the story ends - she decides to end it.

Barry is so compassionate, so humane, and so profoundly understanding of our heartaches and joys, our patience and our rage, that this sort of book is really a vehicle for his words. I imagine him getting up in the morning with his head so boiling with words and emotions that before he's even had coffee he cries 'I must write!' and hits the computer. Or pad of paper. And then, so slowly, crafts his wonderful prose.

As a novel, On Canaan's Side is unsatisfying. Lilly had happy times, but there's too much attention paid to her sorrows, and her periods of recovery from her bereavements aren't developed. Looking at 'On Canaan's Side' as a symphony, the 'bridge passages' are too brief, and the themes are too heavy and too crammed with development. One waits in some fear for the next disaster. Also, her ageing isn't a factor in the tale, until suddenly she's 'an old crone'!

The book is a poem. Plot doesn't matter very much, it's only a scaffold to support the language, which is exquisite. As in a good poem, Barry's words say what the reader longs to say, they illuminate and express thoughts he doesn't know he has.

Alternatively, it should have been a play.
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paul callick
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 24, 2023
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Ranging over most of the 20th century, it's an amazingly short novel really. But I read it slowly; each page, each sentence is so marvellously written. The characters are full of little surprises, all with the ring of truth; I reckon it helps to know something about Irish history.
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R. A. Davison
3.0 out of 5 stars Slightly depressing reflection on a woman's life
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 4, 2012
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On Canaan's Side, which was longlisted but not shortlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize, tells the story of Lily Bere, an elderly Irish American and her "First Day Without Bill" through to her "Seventeenth Day Without Bill". Bill, her grandson, has before the beginning of this novel committed suicide after returning home from the original Gulf War.

On Canaan's Side acts as a memoir for Lily, as she flits between the visits of her friends in her hour of need, and her history beginning with her childhood in Dublin. Though it takes a death as its main plot focus around which the story unfolds it is very much your average "old lady looks back upon her life" novel. It is nicely written and involving and includes much of the history that Lily would have lived through, the Civil Rights movement, political assassinations and Vietnam, right back to the First World War and the changing times of Ireland in the 1920's and how world events can directly impact individual lives.

It was a nice book, and I enjoyed reading it, but, it won't be one which will linger in my mind for a long while to come, or perhaps one which I will particularly remember reading without the aid of my blog. It's also slightly depressing as Lily lives a long, tragedy filled life, were she is often ill used and alone. Apparently Lily's family, the Dunnes are also characters in two other Sebastian Barry novels Annie Dunne and A Long, Long, Way and one day I may read some of those to complete the picture, but, so many books.......so little time..........

6/10
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