![]() ![]() It recently won the Costa Book Award, a prestigious annual prize for writers in Ireland and the United Kingdom.īarry’s fiction often re-examines crucial moments in the history of his native Ireland. ![]() ![]() Thomas is eager to share intimate details about “this man most dear to me.” Before page 30, he and John, a fellow enlistee, have made love for the first time.Īs is surely clear by now, this is a busy novel: a bloody war saga that also happens to be a tale of forbidden love a lament for those who perished during the Great Famine, and a paean to the vigor of the natural world. As he explains it in his punctuation-optional style, “Thank God John Cole was my first friend in America and so in the army too and the last friend for that matter.” The book starts in the early 1850s, as Thomas, just 17, has stumbled into what will become the most important relationship of his life. ![]() Later, during the Civil War, he re-enlists and takes the fight to secessionist troops. Armed with a musket and a bayonet, he’s part of a unit that slaughters American Indians. At its heart is Thomas McNulty, an Irishman who has fled his famine-stricken country and joined up with the U.S. “Days Without End” is a story with some tremendously brutal scenes. In turn, the young soldier inflicts his own set of terrors on the world. These and other miseries befall the narrator of Sebastian Barry’s new historical novel. Hunger and heat waves, fever and floods, frostbite and freezing rain. ![]()
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