Loss of Innocence in Recent Irish Detective Novels: Snow (2020) by John Banville and Old God’s Time (2023) by Sebastian Barry

The article analyses two recent novels by two well acclaimed contemporary Irish novelists, John Banville and Sebastian Barry. Interestingly, both write detective stories, which is not necessarily in the Irish literary tradition of recent representations of trauma and child abuse, namely Snow (2020) and Old God’s Time (2023). And both murder narratives take us aback by the unexpected development of events, triggered by horrific abuses committed by members of the Catholic clergy, imagined in the books but very much rooted in the reality of the Irish society in the 1950s-1980s