Days Without End

"A haunting archeology of youth ... Barry introduces a narrator who speaks with an intoxicating blend of wit and wide-eyed awe, his unsettlingly lovely prose unspooling with an immigrant's peculiar lilt and a proud boy's humor. But in this country's adolescence he also finds our essential human paradox, our heartbreak: that love and fear are equally ineradicable."-Katy Simpson Smith, The New York Times Book Review

"Days Without End is suffused with joy and good spirit ... Through Barry, the frontiersman has a poet's sense of language ... If you underlined every sentence in Days Without End that has a rustic beauty to it, you'd end up with a mighty stripy book."-Sarah Begley, Time

"Mr. Barry's frontier saga is a vertiginous pile-up of inhumanity and stolen love: gore-soaked and romantic, murderous and musical ... The rough-hewn yet hypnotic voice that Mr. Barry has fashioned carries the novel from the staccato chaos of battle to wistful hymns to youth ... an absorbing story that sets the horrors of history against the consolations of hearth and home." -Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"Alternately brutal and folksy ... Barry's prose can take brilliant turns without sounding implausible coming out of Thomas's mouth. A mordant vein of comedy runs through the book ... the 'wilderness of furious death' his characters inhabit has a gut-punching credibility." -Michael Upchurch, The Washington Post

"A true leftfield wonder: Days Without End is a violent, superbly lyrical western offering a sweeping vision of America in the making, the most fascinating line-by-line first person narration I've come across in years."-Kazuo Ishiguro, Booker Prize winning author of The Remains of the Day and The Buried Giant

"Sebastian Barry had me in no uncertain terms from the first sentence and never let up. And he writes like there's no tomorrow-like there are days without end. He navigates the terrain as a master of fictional conventions and sweeps us along in a big picaresque arc that is just the right vessel for his thematic necessities." -David Guterson, author of Snow Falling on Cedars

"Powerful and unsettling, an important look at one of history's most regrettable chapters." -Minneapolis Star Tribune

"A tour de force of style and atmosphere ... Evocative of Cormac McCarthy and Charles Portis, Days Without End is a timeless work of historical fiction."-Booklist (Starred Review)

"A lively, richly detailed story ... A pleasure for fans of Barry and his McNulty stories." -Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

"Incredible ... poetic ... Remarkable ... A gorgeous book about love and guilt, and duty to family."-Book Riot's "All The Books!"

"Days Without End is a work of staggering openness; its startlingly beautiful sentences are so capacious that they are hard to leave behind, its narrative so propulsive that you must move on. In its pages, Barry conjures a world in miniature, inward, quiet, sacred; and a world of spaces and borders so distant they can barely be imagined. Taken as a whole, his McNulty adventure is experimental, self-renewing, breathtakingly exciting. It is probably not ended yet."-Alex Clark, Guardian