Days Without End (Barry) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
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 - New York Times Book Review
 

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.…  [A]n absorbing story that sets the horrors of history against the consolations of hearth and home.
Sam Sacks - 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.… [T]he "wilderness of furious death" his characters inhabit has a gut-punching credibility.
Michael Upchurch - Washington Post


The novel comes close to being a modern masterpiece. Written in a style that is as delicate and economical as a spider’s web, it builds to a climax that is as brutally effective as a punch to the gut.
Times (UK)


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 (UK)


A crowning achievement.
Justine Jordan - Guardian (UK)


Some novels sing from the first line, with every word carrying the score to a searing climax, and Days Without End is such a book. It has the majestic inevitability of the best fiction, at once historical but also contemporary in its concerns.… Days Without End is pitch-perfect, the outstanding novel of the year so far.
Observer (UK)


For its exhilarating use of language alone, Sebastian Barry's Days Without End stood out among the year's novels. Epic in conception but comparatively brief in its extent, this brutal, beautiful book also features the year's most beguiling narrator.… A great American novel which happens to have been written by an Irishman.
Times Literary Supplement (UK)


A lyrical, violent, touching book that is a war story, and a surprising love story.… Barry, the Irish author, presents his tale in language that recalls great American writers, from Walt Whitman to Stephen Crane to Cormac McCarthy.… Barry’s lyrical prose is full of fire and tenderness, violence and compassion, providing a sweeping and intimate vision of America’s conquest and its continuing search for identity.
Richmond Times-Dispatch


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


An absorbing novel.… By making all of his characters rounded, full-blooded human beings, [Barry] has accomplished that thing—inclusion, I think we call it now—that art, particularly fiction, does best.… The writing is unflaggingly vital; sentence after sentence fragment leaps out with surprises.
Bay Area Reporter


Despite moments of humor and colorful metaphors, Thomas’s inconsistent, occasionally unconvincing narrative voice wavers between lyricism and earthiness. Thomas’s trail of woe, though historically accurate, makes for onerous reading.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) An unlikely love story … set on the American frontier in the mid 1800s, and its depth and beauty bring to mind the great prairie novels of Willa Cather..… A beautifully realized historical novel. —Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT
Library Journal


(Starred review.) 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 of one slice of the Irish immigrant experience in America.… Barry writes with a gloomy gloriousness: everyone that crosses his pages is in mortal danger, but there's an elegant beauty even in the most fraught moments.
Kirkus Reviews