And I could feel it grievously leaning on me. The Secret Scripture also took the Costa book of the year, and has now been made into a film, released in the UK this month On Canaan’s Side was longlisted for the Man Booker in 2011, and The Temporary Gentleman followed in 2014.īut, Barry says, “you do get imprisoned in a kind of style, especially after 40 years. The novel follows a rich decade for the Irish writer, with two novels shortlisted for the Man Booker prize: 2005’s A Long Long Way, about Irish soldiers fighting for the crown in the first world war, and 2008’s The Secret Scripture, in which an old woman looks back on the rigid social mores that saw her confined to an asylum. Thomas and John are just “two wood-shavings of humanity in a rough world”, but Barry sets down the horrors of the American Indian wars and civil war and the hardships of frontier life in a blaze of vivid observations that combine stoical matter-of-factness with new-minted wonder. After surviving famine at home and the notorious “coffin ships” to Canada, Thomas McNulty is barely 17 when he joins the US army with his boon companion John Cole, another waif wandering the vast landscape whom he meets under a hedge in Missouri. “I t was literally like being let out of prison,” says Sebastian Barry of his new novel Days Without End, an astonishing portrait of mid-19th century America as seen through the eyes of a young Irish emigrant.
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