Man with Balloons (1960) by Hughie Lee-Smith Courtesy of Swann Auction Galleries / Bridgeman Images

One day, a scholar somewhere will decide that The Newer World marked a cultural watershed. In 2026, they will declare, a white Irishman named Sebastian Barry wrote a book about a black ex-slave and nobody minded. They’ll set it off against the response to Jeanine Cummins’s contentious 2020 contemporary migration novel American Dirt . The comparison suggests a cultural sea change, they’ll say. Surely Barry sounded the death knell for that whole cultural appropriation debate.

But don’t fetch your Apache headdress down from the loft just yet. For starters, Barry has pulled this off before, writing from gay and native American perspectives. And while he was one of many writers to speak out in Cummins’s defence, there are a number of ways Barry’s new book does not resemble hers. First, Barry is a more sensitive writer. Second, Cummins’s book was about migration in a way that Barry’s is not about slavery.…