Days Without End

Thomas McNulty, a famine refugee from County Sligo, lands in Missouri in 1851 and meets John Cole in a Daggsville saloon at age 17. The two enlist together in the US Army, fight in the Indian Wars across the western plains and at the Battle of Murfreesboro in the Civil War, and end up raising a young Lakota girl they call Winona on a Tennessee tobacco farm. Barry writes the entire novel in Thomas's Hiberno-English first-person voice, building a frontier love story between two men inside the violence of the Indian Wars, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.