A Long Long Way
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
OLD GOD'S TIME (MARCH 2023), SEBASTIAN BARRY'S STUNNING NEW NOVEL, AVAILABLE TO PRE-ORDER NOW
One of the most vivid and realised characters of recent fiction, Willie Dunne is the innocent hero of Sebastian Barry's highly acclaimed novel. Leaving Dublin to fight for the Allied cause as a member of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, he finds himself caught between the war playing out on foreign fields and that festering at home, waiting to erupt with the Easter Rising.
Profoundly moving, intimate and epic, A Long Long Way charts and evokes a terrible coming of age, one too often written out of history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori that's the line from Horace (later famously quoted by war poet Wilfred Owen) that Irish poet, playwright and novelist Barry seeks to debunk in this grimly lyrical WWI novel. After four years of brutal trench fighting, Willie Dunne, once an eager soldier in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, is still a "long long way" from home. Irish Home Rule seems a distant fantasy after the miserable Easter 1916 uprising in Dublin, which Willie, back in Ireland on his first furlough, was forced to help quell, firing on his own people; relations with his pro-British father, who abhors Willie's equivocal stance on Irish nationalism, have soured; his beloved Gretta has married another man; and most of his original Irish band of brothers have been slaughtered. The novel's dauntless realism and acute figurative language recall the finest chroniclers of war (Willie supposes that dead French soldiers "lay all about their afflicted homeland like beetroots rotting in the fields"). Still, Barry lingers too long on the particulars of the battlefield the lice, the putrid muck while failing to adequately develop the disasters Willie must face back in Ireland. As such, this somber novel unlike Barry's moving previous book, Annie Dunne, whose eponymous narrator is Willie's younger sister often lacks the nonsoldier human faces necessary to fully counterpoint the coarseness of military conflict, though its inevitably bleak conclusion is heartrending.
Customer Reviews
Fantastic
This book is one which I will treasure in order to read again and again. Well written with a great keenness for detail, thank you mr Barry the best 4 days reading for a long time
From a literature student
I did this book for my English lit course on ww1. About a young boy called willie dunne, from dublin, on his way to war this book tells us about his life in Belgium as a Irish soldier. Even though this book is very true to the ww1 I did not find it my favorate piece of ww1 litrature and some of my class mates found it the same way I did. Although every one is different so you may love it!!!