RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewRiveting and effervescent ... Empty Theatre, its titular metaphor speaking to the isolation behind the pomp, is called a novel, reads like a fairy tale, but is at its heart a biography ... Modern and mythic, Empty Theatre captures the outrageous taste of an era while measuring the steep costs of our dream worlds.
Sebastian Barry
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewDays Without End is a haunting archaeology of youth, when 'time was not something then we thought of as an item that possessed an ending.' To the fatalism and carnage of classic westerns, Barry introduces a narrator who speaks with an intoxicating blend of wit and wide-eyed awe, his unsettlingly lovely prose unspooling with an immigrant’s peculiar lilt and a proud boy’s humor. But in this country’s adolescence he also finds our essential human paradox, our heartbreak: that love and fear are equally ineradicable ... It may seem incongruous to call a novel as violent as Days Without End dreamlike, but Barry’s narrator is a gentle witness to brutality: neither reluctant nor rabid, but a semi-willing instrument — which is to say, like most of those who participate in war ... With uncommon delicacy, Barry reminds us that individual humans buzz about the land like mosquitoes: causing mischief, dying, being born, forgetting. Our recompense comes in those private moments when 'love laughs at history a little.'”
