Days Without End Books in Order

The Days Without End series is a compact two book sequence that carries Barry's family preoccupations across the Atlantic into nineteenth century America. It begins with Days Without End, narrated by Thomas McNulty, and continues in A Thousand Moons, told in the voice of his adopted daughter Winona.

In Days Without End an Irish teenager flees famine, sails to Canada and drifts south into the rough towns of the American frontier. Thomas McNulty and another boy, John Cole, survive at first by dancing in dresses with the local saloon band, earning a living by entertaining lonely miners. When that work dries up they join the Army and spend years fighting in the Indian Wars and the Civil War, riding through massacres, sieges and winter marches that age them long before their time.

Through all this, the heart of the book is the quiet, stubborn love that grows between Thomas and John. They build a kind of makeshift family when they take in Winona, a Lakota girl who has survived the destruction of her own community. Between postings they try to live a small, ordinary life on a farm in Tennessee, raising cattle and learning how to be parents while the violence of the wider country keeps pressing in.

A Thousand Moons moves the story a few years on and gives Winona the narrative. Now a young woman in Reconstruction era Tennessee, she works the farm with Thomas, John and two formerly enslaved friends, Rosalee and Tennyson Bouguereau. When Winona is attacked and cannot clearly remember her assailant, the book becomes part mystery and part coming of age story, as she searches for the truth and for a way of understanding herself in a world that does not see her as fully human.

Compared with the Ireland based novels, these books are more openly violent, full of battle scenes, lynch mobs and the grinding hunger of armies on the move. At the same time they are among Barry's most tender works, celebrating small domestic rituals, songs and jokes as a shield against despair. They are also lightly linked back to the McNulty books, since Thomas is imagined as a distant relative of that Sligo clan, which means Irish history shadows him even in the American West.

Readers can treat Days Without End and A Thousand Moons as a self contained duology. Starting with the first novel will give the fullest emotional arc, but Winona's voice in the second is strong enough that it can be read on its own if you are especially drawn to her story.