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.

So this NUBClub meeting was largely a love fest for how successful we thought Barry was in communicating a story of struggle, identity and family. We were blown away by the language; we all recognized it wasn't meant to be a literal version of how someone would talk at that time, but as a lyrical depiction of the internal life of a very smart but uneducated soldier, it was breathtaking. Barry did a remarkable job of exploring deep questions in very brief and subtle passages, and we felt that allowed him to range across large issues -- who gets to define identity, what is a family, how do we whitewash (literally in this book) history -- without getting away from the lived reality of a trans-gendered soldier in a committed relationship. Nick questioned the necessity of the last turn of the book and a couple of people wondered how much suffering needed to be inflicted in this book for us to get the point (see A Little Life as an analogue), but most of us defended the plot, arguing that it was a chance to see more sides of the endurance and family dependency that was the main character's lifeblood. Overall, we found the book a stunning, painful, and moving journey through issues of revenge, responsibility, and identity, and couldn't recommend it highly enough.