At the American soldiers' first engagement in California, they massacre an encampment of Yurok people, so caught up in bloodlust they hardly notice their victims are all women and children. In some respects, then, the book is a lighthearted picaresque, but it is also a frank and sobering account of violent conflict. I think readers will cheer at how Barry allows this relationship to seem ordinary rather than transgressive. On periods of leave, Thomas and John rent a property where they live with their adopted daughter like a conventional family. During the American-Indian Wars they also encounter Native American braves who regularly cross-dress, a practice called berdache or winkte (see ' Beyond the Book'). At various points in the novel, Thomas dresses in women's clothing for entertainment or disguise. He paints himself and John as innocents, whereas at that time an outsider might have considered them degenerates.įor instance, while they await their first deployment, they take a job dancing in drag at a saloon for two years. 'We were two wood-shavings of humanity in a rough world,' Thomas, now an older man looking back on his eventful youth, writes. By age 17 he pitches up in Daggsville, Missouri, where he meets the man who will become his lover and lifelong friend, John Cole, and together they volunteer for the Army. The narrator is Thomas McNulty, who snuck onto a ship to Canada after his family died during Ireland's potato famine. An entirely believable look at the life of the American soldier in the 1850s and 1860s, this novel succeeds due in part to its folksy dialect and a perfect balance between adventuresome spirit and repulsion at wartime carnage. When I heard that Days Without End (which was named the 2016 Costa Book of the Year), takes place in nineteenth-century America, I worried he wouldn't be able to bring a different setting to life. Irish author Sebastian Barry has written multiple novels about the McNulty clan of Sligo, Ireland, inspired by the lives of his ancestors. Army volunteers have for each other helps them survive the horrors of the Indian Wars and the Civil War. In Days Without End, the love that two U.S.

Days without end book