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.'”
