A lively, richly detailed story of one slice of the Irish immigrant experience in America.

Orphaned in the famine—“all that was left in Ireland was the potato for eating and when the potato was lost there was nothing left in old Ireland”—Thomas McNulty is fresh off the boat in the U.S. when he finds himself wearing blue, packed off to the West to fight Indians. He's fortunate to have a friend in young John Cole, of a loving if potentially lethal bent. Other of his soldier friends are to varying degrees bloodthirsty, psychotic, or crazy brave, and they work evil on every Indian encampment they find until, sickened by it all, the two soldiers find themselves caring for a young Sioux girl they call Winona. It is perfectly in keeping with McNulty’s dark view of a world in which people are angels and devils in equal measure: “I seen killer Irishmen and gentle souls but they’re both the same,” he reflects, “they both have an awful fire burning inside them, like they were just the carapace of a furnace.” Protecting Winona means putting themselves in the path of their comrades, those among whom they have fought from one end of the country to the other against Indians and secessionists. Extending the McNulty saga from books such as The Temporary Gentleman (2014) and The Secret Scripture (2008), 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 (“By Jesus he just drives the knife into the chief’s side”). The story is full of casual, spectacular violence, but none of it gratuitous, and with a fine closing moral: everyone will try to kill you in America, but those who don’t are your friends, and, as Thomas says, “the ones that don’t try to rob me will feed me.”

A pleasure for fans of Barry and his McNulty stories and a contribution not just to Irish literature in English, but also the literature of the American West.

Its gaps and fissures, its silences, its elaboration of attachment, separation and loss amount to a profound meditation on the nature of national identity, enforced emigration and the dispersal of a people into lands frequently inhospitable and alienating, there to forge a new life.

Tom’s quirky narrative makes the unthinkable suddenly comprehensible. When he looks at the enemy and sees the unexpected, so do we. “South don’t got uniforms, grits, or oftentimes shoes. Half of these fierce-looking bastards in bare feet. Could be denizens of a Sligo slum-house. God damn it, probably are, some of them..... Grief may freeze the heart, the body be tested to extremes, but where there’s life there’s hope, and love is what makes life worth living, a sentiment that links Barry’s novels across all their times and places....In Days Without End, what Barry makes unforgettable (and unexpectedly relevant) is American history as seen on the back of the tapestry, the untidy side of the weave, the one that makes more of it suddenly make sense.

Barry creates a sense of America as a huge canvas of juxtaposition and possibility, and human life as something similar.