Synopses & Reviews
COSTA BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD WINNER
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2017 MAN BOOKER PRIZE
"A true leftfield wonder: Days Without End is a violent, superbly lyrical western offering a sweeping vision of America in the making." — Kazuo Ishiguro, Booker Prize winning author of The Remains of the Day and The Buried Giant
From the two-time Man Booker Prize finalist Sebastian Barry, "a master storyteller" (Wall Street Journal), comes a powerful new novel of duty and family set against the American Indian and Civil Wars
Thomas McNulty, aged barely seventeen and having fled the Great Famine in Ireland, signs up for the U.S. Army in the 1850s. With his brother in arms, John Cole, Thomas goes on to fight in the Indian Wars — against the Sioux and the Yurok — and, ultimately, the Civil War. Orphans of terrible hardships themselves, the men find these days to be vivid and alive, despite the horrors they see and are complicit in.
Moving from the plains of Wyoming to Tennessee, Sebastian Barry's latest work is a masterpiece of atmosphere and language. An intensely poignant story of two men and the makeshift family they create with a young Sioux girl, Winona, Days Without End is a fresh and haunting portrait of the most fateful years in American history and is a novel never to be forgotten.
Review
“Barry’s magisterial tale of love, war and redemption is one of the year’s great novels...Visceral violence, wrenching emotion, astutely drawn characters and a compelling narrative voice make for memorable reading.” Minneapolis Star Tribune
Review
“Alternately brutal and folksy...Barry’s prose can take brilliant turns without sounding implausible coming out of Thomas’s mouth. A mordant vein of comedy runs through the book...the ‘wilderness of furious death’ his characters inhabit has a gut-punching credibility.” Michael Upchurch, The Washington Post
Review
“A haunting archeology of youth...Barry introduces a narrator who speaks with an intoxicating blend of wit and wide-eyed awe, his unsettlingly lovely prose unspooling with an immigrant’s peculiar lilt and a proud boy’s humor. But in this country’s adolescence he also finds our essential human paradox, our heartbreak: that love and fear are equally ineradicable.” Katy Simpson Smith, The New York Times Book Review
Review
“Mr. Barry’s frontier saga is a vertiginous pile-up of inhumanity and stolen love: gore-soaked and romantic, murderous and musical...The rough-hewn yet hypnotic voice that Mr. Barry has fashioned carries the novel from the staccato chaos of battle to wistful hymns to youth...an absorbing story that sets the horrors of history against the consolations of hearth and home.” Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
Review
“Days Without End is suffused with joy and good spirit...Through Barry, the frontiersman has a poet’s sense of language...If you underlined every sentence in Days Without End that has a rustic beauty to it, you’d end up with a mighty stripy book.” Sarah Begley, Time
About the Author
Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. His plays include Boss Grady’s Boys (1988), The Steward of Christendom (1995), Our Lady of Sligo (1998), The Pride of Parnell Street (2007), and Dallas Sweetman (2008). His novels include The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998), Annie Dunne (2002), A Long Long Way (2005), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, The Secret Scripture (2008), which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, On Canaan’s Side (2011), and The Temporary Gentleman (2014). His poetry includes The Water-Colourist (1982), Fanny Hawke Goes to the Mainland Forever (1989) and The Pinkening Boy (2005). His awards include the Irish-America Fund Literary Award, The Christopher Ewart-Biggs Prize, the London Critics Circle Award, The Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize, and Costa Awards for Best Novel and Book of the Year. He lives in Wicklow with his family.