Book Club Guide

Days Without End

by Sebastian Barry · 2016 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

Violence and tenderness as simultaneous conditions
The Irish immigrant as the outsider who witnesses American history
Love that has no name yet — and the tenderness it finds

About this book

Thomas McNulty, an Irish immigrant in 1850s America, enlists with the US Army and serves through the Indian Wars and the Civil War — surviving through his love for his fellow soldier John Cole. Barry's National Book Award winner is a novel of extraordinary beauty about violence, tenderness and the survival of love in inhospitable places.

Published in 2016, Days Without End won the Costa Novel Award and the Walter Scott Prize. Barry drew on extensive research into the Indian Wars and the Civil War, while centering the novel on an Irish immigrant perspective.

Discussion questions

Thomas narrates the Indian Wars and the Civil War with a peculiar calm and beauty. How does Barry use this tonal quality — and what does the beauty of the prose say about the narrator's relationship to violence?
Thomas and John's love is never named or analysed — it simply is. What is Barry saying through this refusal to theorise the relationship — and what does that simplicity achieve?
The novel covers enormous historical violence — the systematic destruction of Native American communities, the slaughter of the Civil War. How does Barry manage this scale — through Thomas's limited, personal perspective?
The language of the novel is archaic and rhythmically beautiful. How does this prose style serve the story — and what would more plainspoken narration lose?
Days Without End won the Costa Novel Award and the Walter Scott Prize. What does it do that earns the historical fiction designation — and what does it resist about the genre?