Days Without End: A Novel
Audible Audiobook
– Unabridged
| Price | New from | Used from |
|
Audible Audiobook, Unabridged
"Please retry" |
$0.00
| Free with your Audible trial | |
|
Mass Market Paperback
"Please retry" | — | $8.95 |
|
MP3 CD, Audiobook, MP3 Audio, Unabridged
"Please retry" | $19.46 | $15.43 |
From Sebastian Barry, a two-time finalist for the Man Booker Prize, comes a powerful and unforgettable novel chronicling a young Irish immigrant's army years in the Indian wars and the American Civil War.
Thomas McNulty, having fled the Great Famine in Ireland and now barely 17 years old, signs up for the US Army in the 1850s and with his brother in arms, John Cole, goes to fight in the Indian Wars - against the Sioux and the Yurok - and, ultimately, in the Civil War. Orphans of terrible hardships themselves, they find these days to be vivid and alive, despite the horrors they see and are complicit in.
Moving from the plains of Wyoming to Tennessee, Sebastian Barry's latest work is a masterpiece of atmosphere and language. An intensely poignant story of two men and the makeshift family they create with a young Sioux girl, Winona, Days Without End is a fresh and haunting portrait of the most fateful years in American history and is a novel never to be forgotten.
- Listening Length7 hours and 58 minutes
- Audible release dateJanuary 24, 2017
- LanguageEnglish
- ASINB01N0ZHRZB
- VersionUnabridged
- Program TypeAudiobook
Read & Listen
Get the Audible audiobook for the reduced price of $7.49 after you buy the Kindle book.
Enjoy this audiobook free + more
Free title with your free trial!
$0.00$0.00
- Click above to get a preview of our newest plan - unlimited listening to select audiobooks, Audible Originals, and podcasts.
- You will get an email reminder before your trial ends.
- $7.95$7.95 a month after 30 days. Cancel online anytime.
Buy with 1-Click
-30% $14.95$14.95
Product details
| Listening Length | 7 hours and 58 minutes |
|---|---|
| Author | Sebastian Barry |
| Narrator | Aidan Kelly |
| Whispersync for Voice | Ready |
| Audible.com Release Date | January 24, 2017 |
| Publisher | Blackstone Audio, Inc. |
| Program Type | Audiobook |
| Version | Unabridged |
| Language | English |
| ASIN | B01N0ZHRZB |
| Best Sellers Rank | #152,146 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) #1,563 in Fiction Sagas #1,920 in War & Military Fiction #2,924 in Military Historical Fiction |
Important information
To report an issue with this product, click here.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
There’s a lovely, if somber, touch to the writing, with prose that sings the song of every man.
“We were two wood-shavings of humanity in a rough world.”
This story is narrated by a young Thomas McNulty, a youth who fled Ireland during the time of the Great Famine, came to America, and after many years surviving as a dancer in a saloon along with his then new-found friend John Cole, they volunteered and joined the Army when he was seventeen, or thereabouts, in Missouri.
”If you had all your limbs they took you. If you were a one-eyed boy they might take you too even so. The only pay worse than the worst pay in America was army pay.”
“ Yes, the army took me, I’m proud to say. Thank God John Cole was my first friend in America and so in the army too and the last friend for that matter. He was with me nearly all through this exceeding surprising Yankee sort of life which was good going in every way. No more than a boy like me but even at sixteen years old he looked like a man right enough. I first saw him when he was fourteen or so, very different. That’s what the saloon owner said too.”
They go off, at first, to fight the Indian Wars against the Sioux and the Yurok, and then later, the Civil War. Between those two wars, they bring an eight year-old Sioux girl to live with them. A girl that Mrs. Neale, the Major’s wife, had been teaching, she had learned English and her letters and numbers, along with some cooking skills. Still, Mrs. Neale only agrees to allow this after Thomas assures her that they only want this girl for a servant and not for “their own solace,” and he promises to protect her as his own child. They call her Winona, and from thereon she is known as John Cole’s daughter in a legal sense, but in reality they view her as nothing less than their daughter.
” I guess it’s long ago now. Seems to sit right up in front of my eyes just now though.”
Time. The passage of time is one of the details of life he often reflects on.
”Time was not something then we thought of as an item that possessed an ending, but something that would go on forever, all rested and stopped in that moment. Hard to say what I mean by that. You look back at all the endless years when you never had that thought. I am doing that now as I write these words in Tennessee. I am thinking of the days without end of my life.”
Nature is another object of his reflections. Life in the war and after, the endless nights of sleeping in cold so bitter and deep it could take your life. Days and nights so hot you could barely breathe. The land. The sky viewed as if it were a painting.
”Now in these different districts, the sun came up that bit earlier, more eagerly, more like the baker putting fire into his bread oven, in the small hours, so the women in the town would have bread bright early. Lord, that sun rose regular and sere, he didn’t care who saw him, naked and round and white. Then the rains came walking over the land, as exciting the new grasses, thundering down, hammering like fearsome little bullets, making the shards and dusts of the earth dance a violent jig. Making the grass seeds drunk with ambition. Then the sun pouring in after the rain, and the wide endless prairie steaming, a vast and endless vista of white steam rising, and the flocks of birds wheeling and turning, a million birds to one cloud, we’d a needed a blunderbuss to harvest them, small black fleet wondrous birds.”
Life, what comprises a life at the end of it, the things we recall when stripped down to the days when our breaths can be counted.
”A man’s memory might have only a hundred clear days in it and he has lived thousands. Can’t do much about that. We have our store of days and we spend them like forgetful drunkards.”
War is brutal, gloomy, dark and disturbing, and yet this book couldn’t be more poetic, more powerful, more remarkable, more captivating, more of a pleasure to read, or just plain lovelier.
Recommended
The two protagonists, New England born John Cole and Irish transplant Thomas McNulty (the narrator) meet as desperate half-starved young teens sheltering under a hedge in a Missouri rainstorm. Each is completely on his own. They form an immediate friendship which deepens into a life-long love affair. Thomas describes their love discreetly, but matter-of-factly while acknowledging their caution in light of the prejudices of the times. Thomas says “John Cole was my love, all my love”.
At first, the two boys get work posing as gentile dancing girls in a rough, muddy, all-male frontier town. Their work is completely proper--no shenanigans from the clientele are countenanced. It’s as though the customers are willingly gullible. The boys are mentored and befriended by a kind, but astute showman, Titus Noone, who will appear again in the pair’s saga. The dancing gig ends when the boys begin to grow into men, ending the charade.
They are off to a Spartan life of buffalo hunting and Indian killing in the US cavalry, the only job available. Years go by. John and Thomas experience and commit unspeakable violence. They witness and suffer horrible deprivation and watch friends die. They grieve their loss of innocence. My brief treatment of these years does not adequately reflect their impact and intensity, but our protagonists remain bonded as Thomas describes “John Cole, my beau.”
Finally discharged from the military, our heroes, who have adopted a nine-year-old Indian girl, Winona, seek out their old friend Titus Noone, now running a minstrel show in Grand Rapids, Michigan. John Cole is well over six feet tall; Thomas McNulty on the small side. They are both easy on the eyes. The pair design a sketch that once again puts Thomas in drag, only this time, with so much care taken and money spent on his costume as to make him look like the most glowing, beautiful feminine meme in creation. John Cole plays the chivalrous, decorous suitor, while Winona sings an angelic song. Once again the rough audience buys the illusion and the trio is a stupendous hit.
DeWitt’s writing is glorious. His Thomas tells the tale with uneducated, homespun quirkiness, but also with a deep perceptiveness and immediacy that brings the reader into the action. Though the protagonists participate in the prolific violence of the 18th century, they are also wounded by it and are in the end, gentle, good souls. Thomas’ narration brings that point home.
Top reviews from other countries
C'est une oeuvre historique façon épopée : le héros fait face à toutes sortes d'aventures, dans le cadre de la conquête de l'ouest et de la guerre de Sécession. Personnellement, je ne connais pour ainsi dire rien sur cette période donc ça m'a paru bien documenté, mais apparemment c'est truffé d'erreurs historiques, si l'on en croit une autre critique sur ce site. Si on lit ça juste pour le plaisir, ça ne change pas grand chose.
J'ai aimé que ça ne soit pas du tout manichéen : les horreurs de la guerre y sont décrites, les hommes qui en sont responsables, quels qu'ils soient, ne sont pas simplement des "méchants". Donc le ton n'est pas moralisateur du tout, même si le héros est une heureuse exception en ce sens qu'il est très humaniste (indépendamment des horreurs vécues lors du voyage entre l'Irlande affamée et les US et des crimes de guerre auxquels il a participé). Personnellement, je n'ai pas trouvé ça trop sanglant, ou que l'auteur se complaisait dans les descriptions sordides, mais j'ai lu plusieurs avis contraires. Par exemple, il y a une scène de viol évoquée en deux mots, donc pas d'érotisation malvenue ou de description pénible. Lors des scènes de combat, il y a des descriptions mais ça ne dure par des pages et ça reste assez sobre (de mont point de vue !). Y a pas de scène de torture à rallonge, par exemple, comme on a parfois. Après, il y a beaucoup de scènes de violences, c'est vrai.
Enfin, j'ai trouvé le couple d'hommes qui est au coeur de l'histoire est très attachant et j'ai retenu mon souffle à chaque péripétie. Le roman progresse assez vite, sur un peu plus d'une vingtaine-trentaine d'années, avec des moments pendant lesquelles l'auteur s'arrête sur tel ou tel événement.
Bref, un très bon livre, qui n'est sans doute pas pour tout le monde (mais quel livre l'est ?).