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Days without End (2016)

by Sebastian Barry

Other authors: See the other authors section.

Series: McNulty Family (6)

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
1,2668015,041 (4.01)140
Fiction. Literature. Historical Fiction. From Sebastian Barry, a two-time finalist for the Man Booker Prize, comes a powerful and unforgettable novel chronicling a young Irish immigrant's army years in the Indian wars and the American Civil War.Thomas McNulty, having fled the Great Famine in Ireland and now barely seventeen years old, signs up for the US Army in the 1850s and with his brother in arms, John Cole, goes to fight in the Indian Warsâ??against the Sioux and the Yurokâ??and, ultimately, in the Civil War. Orphans of terrible hardships themselves, they 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 forg… (more)
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English (75)  Latvian (1)  Spanish (1)  All languages (77)
Showing 1-5 of 75 (next | show all)
"There's old sorrow in your blood like second nature and new sorrow that maddens the halls of sense."

In "Days Without End" old sorrow does not begin nor end with genocide on the Great Plains. For Thomas McNulty, a young Irishman transplanted by a harrowing sea journey to the young United States, sorrow reaches back to Thomas Cromwell and the murder of Irish to make way for the English Nation.

By the time McNulty joins the armies of the United States he is embroiled in a campaign to make way for European pioneers across the west. This requires the extermination of the many Indian peoples who count the land as their own.

No treaty, no agreement, no ceasefire means a whit to the conquerors.

Inside this landscape is a love story between two men. McNulty and John Cole bury their love inside barroom theatrics, inside the battlefields of the Civil War, and out the other end to a rural Tennessee.

Sebastian Barry draws out the beauty in the love and the raw beauty of the landscape in extraordinarily crisp prose. I will not forget the thunder of the buffalo herds and the cloud of dust by which you see them miles away.

These are some of those quite beautiful days. Days to temper the violence. The bloodlust. ( )
  MylesKesten | Jan 23, 2024 |
I can't remember the last time I cared so much and so deeply about fictional characters. I couldn't read this book fast enough and the last several chapters had me hyperventilating from sheer concern for these people and the outcome of their story. As I said a book hasn't made me feel emotions this violently in quite a long time, for that, the characters and the beautiful and sleek writing style it gets a 5/5 easily. ( )
  Autolycus21 | Oct 10, 2023 |
I read this because it fit a couple of challenges. Sebastian Barry is an Irish writer. His writing is excellent. I listened to the audiobook and it was a pleasure to listen to the prose. This was set in the time period of the potato famine in Ireland and the Civil War and Indian Wars in the US. It won the 2017 Walter Scott Prize (Historical Fiction). It does feature cross dressing, sexual content (not explicit), and frequent swearing. ( )
  Kristelh | Sep 27, 2023 |
Set in the turbulent United States of the 1850s and 1860s, Days Without End is narrated by an Irish immigrant named Thomas McNulty. Having escaped the great hunger as a teenager, McNulty finds himself in the American West where he befriends fellow Irish immigrant Thomas Cole. The two young men find work dressing in women's clothing to dance with miners, forming a lifelong bond that eventually becomes romantic and sexual.

McNulty and Cole next join the army, first fighting in the Indian Wars of the West and later called back up to fight in the Civil War. Their experience in the military is bloody and full of atrocities. This is contrasted with scenes of domestic life of the committed gay couple. They even adopt an orphaned Lakota girl, Winona, and raise her as their own child. This book can get very disturbing with it's almost casual depiction of the brutality and violence of war, but it's also an endearing story of found family. ( )
  Othemts | Sep 27, 2023 |
While Days Without End by Sebastian Barry is not a classic western, it illuminates a particularly violent time in American history as seen through the eyes of young Irish immigrant, Thomas McNulty.
Opening in the late 1850s, we meet Thomas and his best friend John Cole. With not a lot of options open to poor orphan boys like themselves, the two boys spend some time as dancing partners for miners but when they grow and mature into young men and no longer appeal as females, they join the army. At first they are sent out West to participate in the Indian Wars and as their closeness develops into love, they are soon to be involved in the brutality of the American Civil War.

The author has created two memorable characters, anti-heroes in many ways, cross dresser Thomas and his beloved partner John even adopt a young Indian girl to complete their small family. The times are difficult and the book is packed with violence but the writing is poetic, raw and gripping as the story unfolds. Much like Cormac McCarthy’s writing, the combination of lyrical prose and bloody actions work together to make the story come alive on the pages.

I suspect that Days Without End is a book that one either loves or hates and I come down firmly on the side of love. The plot can seem a little unreal at times, but the author delivers his story is such an interesting way that I found Days Without End to be a very satisfactory read. ( )
  DeltaQueen50 | Sep 25, 2023 |
Showing 1-5 of 75 (next | show all)
A lively, richly detailed story of one slice of the Irish immigrant experience in America.

Orphaned in the famine—“all that was left in Ireland was the potato for eating and when the potato was lost there was nothing left in old Ireland”—Thomas McNulty is fresh off the boat in the U.S. when he finds himself wearing blue, packed off to the West to fight Indians. He's fortunate to have a friend in young John Cole, of a loving if potentially lethal bent. Other of his soldier friends are to varying degrees bloodthirsty, psychotic, or crazy brave, and they work evil on every Indian encampment they find until, sickened by it all, the two soldiers find themselves caring for a young Sioux girl they call Winona. It is perfectly in keeping with McNulty’s dark view of a world in which people are angels and devils in equal measure: “I seen killer Irishmen and gentle souls but they’re both the same,” he reflects, “they both have an awful fire burning inside them, like they were just the carapace of a furnace.” Protecting Winona means putting themselves in the path of their comrades, those among whom they have fought from one end of the country to the other against Indians and secessionists. Extending the McNulty saga from books such as The Temporary Gentleman (2014) and The Secret Scripture (2008), Barry writes with a gloomy gloriousness: everyone that crosses his pages is in mortal danger, but there’s an elegant beauty even in the most fraught moments (“By Jesus he just drives the knife into the chief’s side”). The story is full of casual, spectacular violence, but none of it gratuitous, and with a fine closing moral: everyone will try to kill you in America, but those who don’t are your friends, and, as Thomas says, “the ones that don’t try to rob me will feed me.”

A pleasure for fans of Barry and his McNulty stories and a contribution not just to Irish literature in English, but also the literature of the American West.
added by Richardrobert | editKirkus Reivews (Nov 5, 2016)
 
Its gaps and fissures, its silences, its elaboration of attachment, separation and loss amount to a profound meditation on the nature of national identity, enforced emigration and the dispersal of a people into lands frequently inhospitable and alienating, there to forge a new life.
added by msjudy | editThe Guardian, Alex Clark (Oct 28, 2016)
 
Tom’s quirky narrative makes the unthinkable suddenly comprehensible. When he looks at the enemy and sees the unexpected, so do we. “South don’t got uniforms, grits, or oftentimes shoes. Half of these fierce-looking bastards in bare feet. Could be denizens of a Sligo slum-house. God damn it, probably are, some of them..... Grief may freeze the heart, the body be tested to extremes, but where there’s life there’s hope, and love is what makes life worth living, a sentiment that links Barry’s novels across all their times and places....In Days Without End, what Barry makes unforgettable (and unexpectedly relevant) is American history as seen on the back of the tapestry, the untidy side of the weave, the one that makes more of it suddenly make sense.
 
Barry creates a sense of America as a huge canvas of juxtaposition and possibility, and human life as something similar.
added by ghefferon | editThe New Yorker
 

» Add other authors (1 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Barry, Sebastianprimary authorall editionsconfirmed
Andersson, ErikTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Devaux, LaetitiaTraductionsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Glynne-Jones, Susana de la HigueraTraductorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Higuera, Susana de laTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Mennella, CristianaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Oeser, Hans-ChristianÜbersetzersecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Reitsma, Jan WillemTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Seppa, KĂĽlliTõLkijasecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Tuuling, MariToimetajasecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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Epigraph
I saw a wayworn trav'ler
In tattered garments clad

John Mathias
I saw a wayworn trav'ler
In tattered garments clad
- John Mathias
Dedication
For my son Toby
First words
The method of laying out a corpse in Missouri sure took the proverbial cake.
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(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
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Information from the French Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to your language.
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Fiction. Literature. Historical Fiction. From Sebastian Barry, a two-time finalist for the Man Booker Prize, comes a powerful and unforgettable novel chronicling a young Irish immigrant's army years in the Indian wars and the American Civil War.Thomas McNulty, having fled the Great Famine in Ireland and now barely seventeen years old, signs up for the US Army in the 1850s and with his brother in arms, John Cole, goes to fight in the Indian Warsâ??against the Sioux and the Yurokâ??and, ultimately, in the Civil War. Orphans of terrible hardships themselves, they 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 forg

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After signing up for the US army in the 1850s, aged barely seventeen, Thomas McNulty and his brother-in-arms, John Cole, go on to fight in the Indian wars and, ultimately, the Civil War.

Having fled terrible hardships they find these days to be vivid and filled with wonder, despite the horrors they both see and are complicit in. Their lives are further enriched and imperilled when a young Indian girl crosses their path, and the possibility of lasting happiness emerges, if only they can survive.

Moving from the plains of the West to Tennessee, Sebastian Barry's latest work is a masterpiece of atmosphere and language. Both an intensely poignant story of two men and the lives they are dealt, and a fresh look at some of the most fateful years in America's past, Days Without End is a novel never to be forgotten. [Amazon.co.uk]
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