Days Without End by Sebastian Barry
Synopsis
After signing up for the US army in the 1850s, aged barely seventeen, Thomas McNulty and his brother-in-arms, John Cole, fight in the Indian Wars and the Civil War. Having both fled terrible hardships, their days are now vivid and filled with wonder, despite the horrors they both see and are complicit in. Then when a young Indian girl crosses their path, the possibility of lasting happiness seems within reach, if only they can survive.
Reviews
'A book about cruel times, for cruel times. And tender enough to swell your throat ... Not since Peter Carey's Ned Kelly has a narrative voice so got inside my head.' Tom Sutcliffe ? BBC Radio 4
'There isn't much I can add to the noisy chorus of praise that's already greeted Sebastian Barry's Days Without End, which was inexplicably left off the Man Booker shortlist this year.' Robert Douglas-Fairhurst ? Spectator
'Occasionally you know that one of the writers alive at the same time as you has written the book they were born to write. With Barry, it's as if every book he writes is a bit like this - and then there's this novel. It's a masterpiece. Barry writes warmth so that warmth is a form of truth.' Ali Smith
About the Author
Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. The 2018-21 Laureate for Irish Fiction, his novels have twice won the Costa Book of the Year award, the Independent Booksellers Award and the Walter Scott Prize. He had two consecutive novels shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, A Long Long Way (2005) and the top ten bestseller The Secret Scripture (2008), and has also won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize, the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He lives in County Wicklow.