Days without End takes us on a journey that mixes true love, grim brutality, enduring loyalty and grinding poverty.
Set in America in the mid-19th century it follows the lives of two young men who meet up and fall in love. Although much of the book involves the harsh world of military life there are moments of genuine humour such as when our two soldiers spend months entertaining hardened miners as a "man and woman" with considerable success! Contrast this with the brutal extermination they inflict whilst in uniform. Under orders they wipe out Indians [men women and children] as well as dozens of Confederate soldiers without seemingly any regret. But, don't be misled, our two young men understand as well as share love and it is this innate gentleness that shall stay with you. excellent authorship at its best.

Days Without End really is as good as everyone says it is. I was a little sceptical but eventually tried it because so many people had said it was great – and it is. Truly excellent.

This is the story of Thomas McNulty who left Ireland like so many others around 1850 because of "the hunger" to seek a new life in the New World. Narrated by Thomas himself looking back in later years, it's a tale of hardship and survival and of life in the US Army before, during and after the Civil War. It has important things to say about many things, including friendship, the companionship and sometimes divided loyalties of soldiers, the meaning of family and also a powerful, enduring love between two men. It's brilliantly done; I found it utterly gripping and often profoundly moving.

What makes this so special for me is Thomas's voice, which is a wonderful mixture of the slightly rough, naïve and uneducated and also the evocatively poetic. I'm no expert on the language of that time and place, but it rang absolutely true to me and I genuinely felt as though Thomas was sitting with me and telling his story. He evokes the real feel of the Old West brilliantly, with all its hardships and some pleasures, and the terror, exultation and horror of battle is as well drawn as I've ever read. Some is hard to read because of its content, but never because of the telling. The appalling massacres of Native Americans and the terrible battles of the Civil War kept me absolutely riveted and often feeling wrung-out afterward from the intensity of them. It's never overblown and often rather understated in a way, but utterly gripping and immensely powerful; I felt as though I was there at Thomas's shoulder, feeling all his complexity of emotion.

I marked lots of sentences and passages which I liked and which give a flavour of the book's style. As a couple of brief examples: "Dark fields and troubled crops, the big sky growing melancholy with evening." Or of a Catholic army padre who is liked by men of all denominations, "A good heart carries across fences. Fr Giovanni. Small man wouldn't be much good for fighting but he good for tightening those screws that start to come loose on the engine of a man when he's facing God knows what."

Quite simply, this is a wonderfully involving read, superbly written; it is one of the best things I have read for some time and I cannot understand why it didn't at least make the Booker Shortlist. Too enjoyably readable, perhaps? Very warmly recommended.

A story of endurance and love set against the American Civil War. Thomas McNulty, in old age, is looking back at his early life as a young Irish immigrant. When he meets John Cole they become best friends. ‘We were only rats of people. Hunger takes away what you are,’ so they do anything to survive: join the army against the Sioux Indians, dress as women, and go back to the army in the Civil War to fight on the side of the north to end slavery. ‘We worked back and forth through the milling bodies and tried to kill everything that moved in the murk.’ They are so young that ‘time was not something then we thought of as an item that possessed an ending, but something that would go on forever.’ Despite everything they endure, there is a sense of optimism.
The language is amazingly fresh and inventive, with imagery always taken from the world Thomas and John Cole inhabit. Buffalo are ‘a big boil of black molasses in a skillet, surging up.’ The weather is described as ‘endless yards of rain as thick as cloth.’ Or – ‘there’s a great jamboree of lightning and noise that makes the far hills stand out black as burnt bread.’
What makes this novel stand out, is an openness to wonder at the beauty of the world, and the possibility of love in the darkest times – love between men, across races and parental love.
A harrowing, beautifully described story with a unique voice by a writer at the top of his game.

This book is one of the most beautiful love stories I've ever read. Set in a backdrop of civil war and the slaughter of First Nation peoples, it is the work of a literary master to bring out the best of this disparate group of characters.The relationships shared by this predominantly male cast are both heartbreaking and heartwarming. There is a simplicity of language and imagery that draws you in to Thomas and John's story and that makes you wish to journey with them. I couldn't help but fall in love with both the main characters and to celebrate their relationship and their love for their daughter.

War and love in old America... 3½ stars

Our narrator, Thomas McNulty, is a young Irish immigrant alone in 1850s America when he meets John Cole, another boy who is destined to be his friend, companion and lover throughout his life. This is the story of their lives and, through them, the story of this period of American history. The boys work for a time as “girls” in a saloon, where they are paid to dance with lonely miners, but when they become too old to be convincing, they go off to join the army. Soon they are involved in the on-going conflicts with the Native Americans and later will be sucked into the Civil War.

When I finished reading this book, I had rather mixed feelings about it – the writing is often wonderful and Barry undoubtedly brings the army scenes to vivid and gory life. But truthfully, my eyebrows rose when the boys dressed up as girls and all the miners treated them as courteously as if they were really girls (not that I imagine they would have treated real saloon girls particularly courteously anyway); and continued to rise throughout all the gender identity stuff with which the book is liberally packed – yes, pun very much intended. I had no idea the early Americans were so politically correct as to accept transvestitism and transsexuality with barely a disapproving comment – how terribly inclusive they were back in those days! It's suggested more than once that in fact all these rough, tough settlers were secretly enthralled by the idea of men appearing on stage dressed as women, finding them more sexually alluring and exciting than actual women. Hmm! Maybe it really was like that – how would I know? - but I found it pretty unconvincing, regardless of the skill in the story-telling.

What I found much more convincing were the soldiering aspects. The narrator, Thomas McNulty, is an uneducated man, though not unintelligent, and is entirely uninterested in politics, so that we get his view of events from a purely human angle, with no overt polemics. Clearly, Barry himself takes the modern view that what the settlers did to the Native Americans was a horrific atrocity, but he does an excellent job of showing how it may have been viewed differently by those involved; especially those who, like Thomas and John Cole, were at the bottom of the pile in terms of power – only obeying orders, as has been the excuse used for war-crimes for all the long centuries of history. At the time of this story, the struggle between the races has been going on for many years, so that it's easy for the participants not to look for original causes – instead, each side has suffered tragedies that become excuses for revenge. Barry shows the horrors of battle and massacres in all their cruel and bloody detail and the power of his language makes these passages vivid and often deeply moving. Unfortunately there are so many of these incidents, though, that in the end I found them becoming repetitive and as a result the power diminished as the book progressed.

Barry also does a good job of showing how ordinary soldiers get drawn into wars they don't necessarily understand nor feel strongly about. Thomas and John Cole end up on the Unionist side during the Civil War, but only because that's where their commanding officers lead them. There is a feeling that they don't really know what they're fighting for and would as easily have fought as rebels had they happened to be in one of the Confederate regiments when the war started. As a political animal, I was rather disappointed that there wasn't more about the causes of the Civil War but that, I believe, was an intentional decision and worked well in the context of the book.

Not content with dragging current liberal fixations with gender identity into it, Barry also has a shot at making some points about race – specifically, about the position of Native Americans in this new world. Though I found this aspect more credible, I didn't feel he handled it particularly deftly or in any great depth – it felt to me rather tacked on as though he felt it ought to be there rather than being something he felt strongly about. The main Native American character, Winona, never came to life for me – she seems to be merely a foil about whom a few “points” could be made, and a hook on which to hang the loose plot.

In fact, the characterisation in general didn't do much for me. At a late stage, Thomas says of John Cole “I never think bad of John, just can't. I don't even know his nature. He a perpetual stranger and I delight in that.” I too felt I still didn't know his nature, but my delight in that fact was somewhat less profound.

So, given all my criticisms, it's fair to wonder why I'm still giving the book 3½ stars (rounded up). Firstly, the prose is mostly excellent, often beautiful, frequently moving, and I'm always more willing to forgive a good deal of other weaknesses if the writing thrills me. Secondly, I half read, half listened to this book, and the narration by Aidan Kelly is quite wonderful. The book is written in what is clearly supposed to be an uneducated Irish voice, with lots of grammatical and punctuation quirks, and can actually feel quite like hard work sometimes on the written page. But Kelly shows how, when read aloud, it sounds absolutely natural, as if an Irishman were indeed verbally telling the tale. Kelly brings out all the beauty in the prose, and the contrasts in humour, horror, sorrow and love within the story. It's a remarkable performance, and I found myself actually preferring to listen than to read, sometimes going back to listen to a passage I had read to see how Kelly interpreted it.

Overall, therefore, despite finding it quite deeply flawed in terms of credibility and characterisation, my experience of reading/listening to it was an enjoyable one, and so in the end I would recommend it.

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Faber & Faber Ltd.

Whatever I had expected from this novel (the experiences of Irish immigrants to America perhaps), it certainly wasn’t this. So many themes here, and Irish immigrant characters for sure, including some unusual ones, not least the seeming acceptance by the 19th century population of homosexual couples. I was very taken with the narrating voice of Thomas, eloquent beyond his education, and through his wry commentary we get a real sense of a young nation coming into being. Some harrowing scenes too - war is hell and worst of all is civil war and what we would now call ethnic cleansing. Thomas witnesses acts of calculated brutality and instances of kindness side by side and the end result is a masterly depiction of humanity at its best and worst.

Sublimely well written. Stunning images, for example:

‘It is approaching dusk and that same God is pulling a ragged black cloth slowly across his handiwork.’

‘No one says too much and what is said is only light-hearted and bantering because we want to preserve our advantage over fear. Fear like a bear in the cave of banter.’

‘But we take a night’s rest in a boarding house and wash ourselves and then next morning as we stirring to go was that queer feeling of greeting the lice moving back onto clean limbs. They was residing in the seams of our dresses all night and now like those emigrants along that old Oregon trail they creep across the strange Americas of our skins.’

and my personal favourite:

‘His skin is made of the aftermaths of smiles.’

Not a very upbeat story, though not unremittingly bleak either, we are left feeling hopeful for the main characters’ future and with that hopeful for the success of the new nation. Highly recommended.

This was a fascinating and beautifully written book and one that I might well have given up on, had I not persevered beyond the first few chapters. I was initially put off by the voice of the narrator, an uneducated and often ungrammatical young man, whose style of writing was very colloquial and superficially unsophisticated. However, once the spell of the frank and forthright recollections had been woven, I found it hard to tear myself from the tale. The language revealed a sensitivity and poetry through its directness and the simplistic cataloguing of seasons and time passing, but also an unwavering sense of morality underlying his thoughts and motivation. I was totally drawn into the strange and brutal world of the 19th century US army, and the different ways the protagonists managed to navigate their path through the difficulties thrown before them. I was left with the sense that, no matter how implausible the adventures, I really cared about what would happen to them and would have gladly shared their company for much longer. A compelling and wonderful read that was well worth pursuing.

I love Sebastian Barry. He's probably my favourite contemporary Irish author after Donal Ryan. I've read (and loved) 6 of his previous novels.
This one, however, I've had to give up halfway through. I've tried hard to like it, nevermind love it, but I've found my mind constantly wandering as soon as I read a sentence. I have no idea what's going on! The breaking point was when a character who I thought had been killed comes trotting back in on a horse. Had he been killed?! Injured? Who knows?! I haven't a clue!

This is a compelling read that scrolls across the new America around the years of civil war. The author deals sensitively with two gay men who are both cross dressers and soldiers in the course is f their youth. That is an achievement in itself but it is carried off with panache. There are times of suspense, of humour and of real sadness. The language used is accurate and superb. It rolls along as if the lead characters were addressing the reader. This is a unique book and well worth reading.

The most beautiful novel I've read this year. Marvellous.

Essentially a monologue that whips through close to 40 years in a couple of hours, this somehow manages to be both savage and life-enhancing, artless and artful, packed with all the contradictions and confusions of life itself.

Barry embeds us in Civil War-era America, yet quite shamelessly infuses the narrative with modern concerns about identity, gender, violence, what it means to be forced to leave your home for a new and unknown country, how a family might be created from nothing but unlikely components.

What holds the whole thing together is the mellifluous voice of Thomas McNulty, a voice which should be unbelievable yet for which we willingly suspend our disbelief, handing ourselves over to this man who strings together words and ideas and images with such feeling and seemingly uncontrived skill.

The real magic here is Barry's - I suspect that in another author's hands I might have hated this story with its distanced 'telling'; as it is Barry held me captured for the 3 or so hours it took me to read this - a thrilling piece of writing.

For me, this was the Book Without End.

It started so brightly. Two young boys willing to wear dresses and dance to entertain the miners in some wild west saloon. It's nice. It's different. It's unusual. It earns the novel a second star. But then the boys grow up and can no longer pass as women, so they go off a-soldiering. They meet some Indians and kill them. They meet some more Indians and don't kill them. They meet some more Indians and kill them...

It was just so repetitive.

And being honest, I never really bought the narrative voice either. It sounds arty and forced. Let's be arty and poetic, but toss in some grammatical tics to remind us all that we are dealing with burel men whose rude speche we must excuse.

This is not a long book, but I struggled to get a third of the way through it in a week. Every time I thought of picking it up, I got a sense of dread. And every time I put it down, I felt that it was an hour of my life that I would never get back (even though, I suspect, these hours lasted no more than 15 minutes apiece).

So, a third of the way through, I decided to stop. Some who have read the whole damned thing tell me that the last couple of chapters are quite good, but they agree that the vast middle meanders. This is the point where I have made a pact with myself not to read any more Sebastian Barry. I enjoyed Enais McNulty and Annie Dunne, but more recent stuff has felt tired. I feel as though Sebastian Barry is writing for himself and not for me. That's his prerogative, and it is clearly working for him and for Booker judges, but I'm not going to be part of it any more.

Sorry Sebastian.

A fantastically written historical novel, of a time well known but presented from a different perspective. Harrowing in places but a rollercoaster of a read through the American civil war, exploring identity - what does it mean to be American, male, a soldier, a friend, or different in some way.

Set in America in the mid-1800s, Days Without End tells the story of another member of the McNulty clan who have featured in several earlier Sebastian Barry novels.   Thomas McNulty fled the famine in Ireland and is trying his luck as a hired hand in the US army, firstly fighting to clear Native Americans from their own land, and latterly on the side of the Union in the Civil War, always at the side of his lover, fellow Irishman John Cole.

Thomas narrates the story in his own distinctive voice, a combination of Irish patois and innocent enthusiasm for his new way of life.  The brutality of the wars in which Thomas fights is never shied away from, but underneath it all he longs for a stable life with John and their adopted Native American daughter.   It sounds unrealistic and fanciful that a same-sex couple could be able to live their lives in this way at that time in history, but Barry skilfully describes the way that the pair keep their relationship under the radar and how, at a time when life is precious and men are fighting for survival every day, their fellow soldiers are either unaware or prepared to turn a blind eye.

I did find myself drifting off during some of the rather long-winded 'fighting and trekking' passages, but what kept me going was Thomas' appealing narrative, his lust for survival and his love for his unconventional family.   It's not my favourite McNulty book -  I preferred the Irish setting of The Secret Scripture or The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty - but still a very poignant and beautifully written story.

History must be filled with gay love stories whether they were lived in secret or in the open. Although literature and history books are filled with heterosexual love stories, few stories of same-sex couples have been passed down through generations. So I think one of the great opportunities of historical fiction can be to imagine the lives and stories which we have no record of and that have, most probably, been selectively left out of history. Recent novels such as “Hide” by Matthew Griffin and “A Place Called Winter” by Patrick Gale have meaningfully explored stories of long-term gay relationships and the unique challenges and opportunities they faced in their respective time periods. Sebastian Barry does the same in “Days Without End” with the story of an Irishman named Thomas McNulty who escapes the Irish famine to become a soldier in 19th century America where he meets another handsome soldier named John Cole. But Barry’s inspiration for this novel comes from a specific incident and takes a very unique slant on a historical gay relationship.

I saw Barry give a reading from this novel and he explained how some time ago he noticed that his son was becoming increasingly depressed. One day the son finally confessed to Barry and his wife that he’s gay and he experienced a lot of prejudice for this. So part of what Barry wanted to do in this story was imagine a time and place where his son could have a loving same-sex relationship, build a family and not have to live with the institutionalized prejudices of today’s society. This may seem contradictory when many Western countries have increasingly liberal laws about gay rights, but these values don’t always filter down into smaller communities - especially among teenagers. Barry feels that there were different kinds of opportunities for gay couples in mid-1800s America to live (if not entirely openly) more peacefully without today’s virulent prejudice. Of course, homosexuality wasn’t openly condoned and people faced many other life-threatening challenges during this politically turbulent time as he recounts in detail in the novel. Thomas states how “We were two wood-shavings of humanity in a rough world.”

This is the first novel I’ve read by Sebastian Barry, but I understand it’s part of a group of books that deal with the McNulty family. It seems like a novel that can stand entirely independent on its own without having read the others. Thomas arrives in America without any connection to his relatives except for the memories of their slowly dying which haunts him later in the book. Here he must forge a future for himself entirely on his own and one of the few work opportunities available to a young man such as himself was to become a soldier in the US military. He’s sent to fight in the bloody battles of the Indian War and then later with the North during the American Civil War. The overwhelming impression of Thomas’ impassioned and vivid accounts of these conflicts is how they are populated by soldiers who are victims of their circumstances; they are fighting in wars not out of ideological convictions but because they have no other choice.

It’s particularly moving how Barry writes about the way Thomas is mindful of “the enemy.” He observes that “There’s no soldier don’t have a queer little spot in his wretched heart for his enemy; that’s just a fact. Maybe only on account of him being alive in the same place and the same time and we are all just customers of the same three-card trickster. Well, who knows the truth of it all.” Like all wars, the armies are filled with young men trapped in the conflicts of history. It’s easier for them to fight without conscience when the opposition is markedly different from them such as the Native Americans they fought against. However, Thomas takes a different perspective when battling against the armies of the South which were also in part made of young immigrants or the sons of immigrants: “It is not like running at Indians who are not your kind but it is running at a mirror of yourself. Those Johnny Rebs are Irish, English and all the rest.” Barry really movingly portrays the consciousness of this soldier caught in these battles who is in some fundamental way only killing other versions of himself.

The novel also gives a fascinating perspective on gender and sexuality. Hyper-masculine environments such as army camps and mining towns found improvised ways of providing men with romantic/erotic stimulation. Thomas and John join a sort of cabaret where they entertain audiences of men while dressed in drag. This allows for transformations to occur: “In Mr Noone’s hall you just was what you seemed. Acting ain’t no subterfuge-ing trickery. Strange magic changing things. You thinking along some lines and so you become that new thing.” There’s a kind of liberation in this where people aren’t constricted by traditional identity markers but can become what they want to be. It also provides crucial training for Thomas when later in the story he can utilize passing as a woman to disguise himself. Equally, it’s poignant how Thomas contemplates his own sexuality and feminine qualities where he considers these to be “Just a thing that’s in you and you can’t gainsay.” While the meaning of conflicts being fought in the battlefields remains ambiguous for Thomas, the conviction he and John feel about their desire and love for each other is certain.

History consists of a series of neatly organized dates. The American Civil War lasted from 1861 to 1865 but you can’t begin to feel the experience by just reading this. One of the most powerful things about Costa Book Awards winner "Days Without End" is the extremely dramatic sense Barry gives to the soldier’s experience who doesn’t know when this conflict will end. For Thomas “World is just a passing parade of cruel moments and long drear stretches where nothing going on but chicory drinking and whisky and cards. No requirement for nothing else tucked in there. We’re strange people, soldiers stuck out in wars.” They are perpetually caught in an uncertain present. Barry writes strikingly about this sense a high-stakes moment with no end to it. The dramatic tension builds throughout the novel as the reader wonders if Thomas will have any future other than this.

I did enjoy this and can see why 'Days Without End' has been raved about and won awards recently. However, it disappointed me in some ways, partly due to the voice of Thomas McNulty which I found difficult to engage with. The era being described is very different to modern 21st Century life and I can appreciate this. Despite this, the advertised gay 'theme' is not really that evident - maybe because it wouldn't have been at the time of the war and it had to be undercover, as far as this was possible. So, I was expecting slightly more emotion regarding Thomas and John's relationship and felt short-changed that it didn't appear.

This is original and clever but my feelings about the book are quite different to others I have read. It just goes to show how what is successful and evidently very good is not going to be enjoyed in the same way by all.

www.goodreads.com/review/show/1780834977

Wow. What a powerful book. It's so easy to forget that this is amongst the most violent and brutal of books I have ever read, the beauty and compassion come through so strong. The prisoner of was camp is harrowing and will stay with me forever, but so will the image of the two lovers holding hands with their daughter at the foot of the bed. The book reads like a eulogy to John Cole, there's no dissection of their relationship and the awful things that happen to them are never shameful. Barry has said he is envisioning a utopia where sexuality is not noticed, but it clearly is in the novel's world, hence my views of it as a flattering tribute where horribleness is ommitted by design.

It’s the first half of the 19th century. Thomas McNulty, fleeing the famine in Ireland, finds himself just as down and out and homeless in America. He enlists in the army, which welcomes all comers, along with his new friend John Cole and is put to fight, first against the native Americans and then in the Civil War. Hard as this life is, it is no worse than the privations he has already suffered in his existence thus far.
Thomas McNulty narrates in unusual, sweeping and lyrical language. The novel should be read slowly, as every single word is important. The plight of the Indians and the Rebels would, as they say, tear the heart from you. So what was missing for me?
Thomas’ reporting of the action is stunning, but he tells of his relationship with John, and Winona, the niece of the Sioux chief less convincingly, perhaps too remotely to feel part of. Thomas’ bravery, sense of justice and unwavering love for John are slightly overshadowed in this dark and emotional work.

WOW, This is a compelling read - mixing the widescreen story of the USA from civil war, gold rush and beyond, with the personal stories of the protagonists.

The skill of the writer to bring you into their world, with vivid descriptions and majors pieces.

Highly recommended.