Why did you want to take on such a formative part of American history?īARRY: Well, the whole adventure of these seven books, indeed, has been to try and go and find, if only in the imagination, these bits and bobs of my family, the people who weren't talked about, the people who - around whom a silence fell, whether for political reasons or because they went so far and never came home.
SAM BRIGER, BYLINE: And that's Sebastian Barry reading from his new book, "Days Without End." Sebastian Barry, welcome to FRESH AIR.īRIGER: Your book deals with the American expansion West, the Indian Wars and the Civil War. But you were glad to get work because if you didn't work for the few dollars in America, you hungered. And they fed you queer stuff till you just stank. The only pay worse than the worst pay in America was Army pay. If you were a one-eyed boy, they might take you, too, even so. If you had all your limbs, they took you. Since the bloom was gone off me, I had volunteered aged 17 in Missouri. I am talking now about the finale of my first engagement in the business of war. The point was, we were glad to see them so well turned out. But dead boys don't mind things like that. Wood cut so thin at the mill, it was more a wafer than a plank. You lift one of those boxes, and the body makes a big sag in it. True enough their boxes weren't, but that was not the point. Anyway, death likes to make a stranger of your face. No one that knew him could have recognized Trooper Watchorn because those famous Dundrearies was gone. Their faces clean shaved, as if the embalmers sure didn't like no whiskers showing. All their uniforms brushed down with lamp oil into a state never seen when they were alive. The method of laying out a corpse in Missouri sure took the proverbial cake, like decking out our poor lost troopers for marriage rather than death. "Days Without End" is narrated by an elderly Thomas McNulty, recounting events from 50 years ago. They started with a reading from the book. Sebastian Barry spoke with FRESH AIR producer Sam Briger. That part of the novel was inspired by Barry's son, Toby, who came out to him a few years ago while Barry was researching the book.īarry dedicated "Days Without End" to his son. McNulty finds companionship and love in one of his fellow soldiers, handsome John Cole. Many were conscripted right off the boat as the price of citizenship. McNulty's plight was not uncommon for Irish immigrants of the 19th century. "Days Without End" follows the life of Thomas McNulty who flees the Great Famine of Ireland as a boy and winds up a soldier on the Great Plains of America fighting in the Indian Wars and later in the Civil War.
He's the only author to have received it twice. Irish writer Sebastian Barry just won the Costa Book of the Year Award for his new novel, "Days Without End." It's an award given to writers based in the U.K.
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