When they gave the Costa Book Award 2016 to Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End, the judges described it perfectly.  “A miracle of a book – both epic and intimate – that manages to create spaces for love and safety in the noise and chaos of history“.

The novel is narrated by Thomas McNulty, an Irish-born immigrant, who enlists to fight in the Indian Wars and again in the Civil War on the Union side.  His tale is of conflict and peace, of savagery, suffering, and tenderness, of hatred and love.  Love most particularly for a fellow soldier, John Cole, and the Native American daughter they adopt and raise together.

In these times when America is so divided, uncertain, and suspicious, Days Without End is a piercing reminder of what millions of unnamed immigrants sacrificed for the country, what they gave, what they lost, and what they destroyed in the endless task of building and renewing America. It also reclaims for gay men a place in the past from which conventional history-telling has erased their memory.  It’s a novel of unusual beauty and power, a shocking depiction of war and the experience of soldiers, and filled with tenderness found in the least likely of places and circumstances.  Somewhat surprisingly, it’s also very funny in parts.  It’s simply one of the best novels I’ve read in a long time.