![]() ![]() ![]() 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. ![]()
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