Sebastian Barry’s “novel The Secret Scripture has its prize, in the form of the £25,000 Costa book of the year award — but only by the very skin of its teeth. In what the chair of the judges, Matthew Parris called ‘an extraordinarily close finish’, the 53-year-old Irish novelist gained the support of five out of the nine judges — with the others supportive of Adam Foulds’s narrative poem The Broken Word, set during the Mau Mau uprising in 1950s Kenya.”