Dublin Writers Festival 2009 - 2nd to 7th June

How does the novelist refract, through the haze of memory, the secret history of a life long-lived? How does the past hold the present in its thrall? And how do these recollections help shape our understanding of our own lives? Two new novels explore this fertile terrain with compelling results.

Sebastian Barry is the Dublin-born playwright, poet and Booker-shortlisted author of the best-selling A Long Long Way. His latest novel The Secret Scripture reveals the contingent lives of centegenarian patient Roseanne McNulty and her long-term psychiatrist, Dr Grene. Told through their respective journals, it reveals two lives blighted by ignorance yet marked by passion and hope.

Described by Nick Hornby as ‘the best English novelist of his generation’, Jonathan Coe made his name with the caustic satires What a Carve up and The Rotter’s Club. His new novel The Rain Before It Falls strikes out for fresh new territory as the dying Rosamond reveals a tumultuous family history, bequeathed through a series of taped revelations to a cousin's blind granddaughter.

De Niro's Game is the debut novel by Lebanese-Canadian writer Rawi Hage, originally published in 2006.

The novel's primary characters are Bassam and George, lifelong friends living in wartorn Beirut. The novel traces the different paths that the two follow as they face the difficult choice of whether to stay in Beirut and get involved in organized crime, or to leave Lebanon and build a new life in another country.

The IMPAC Dublin Literary Award is the largest and most international prize of its kind. Since its inception in 1996 it has rewarded the likes of Colm Toibin, Orhan Pamuk, Michel Houellebecq, Nicola Barker and Per Petterson for outstanding works of literary merit.