Book Club — Days Without End

October’s Primrose Hill Community Library Book Club will be discussing Days Without End by Sebastian Barry.

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.

Considered one of Ireland’s finest literary voices, Sebastian Barry has garnered praise as a playwright, poet and novelist having won a host of major prizes and has been twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for his novels A Long Long Way and The Secret Scripture which also won the Costa Book of the Year Award.