The Temporary Gentleman
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3.0 • 3 Ratings
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- €9.99
Publisher Description
FROM THE TWICE-WINNER OF THE COSTA BOOK OF THE YEAR
'Heartbreaking.' Observer
'Brilliant.' The Times
Jack McNulty, a former UN observer, has worked around the world and seen extraordinary things, but as he contemplates his return to Ireland after many years in Ghana, his memories are dominated by his tumultuous marriage to Mai Kirwan. A great beauty with a vivid mind, Mai was also an elusive and troubled soul, stuck in a marriage that could never last.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
With exquisitely beautiful prose, Irish author Sebastian Barry unfolds the story of Irishman Jack McNulty: a deeply flawed man who sits at a desk in his makeshift home in Accra, Ghana, recording the extraordinary details of his life. As The Temporary Gentleman’s erratic narrator revisits his itinerant adventures and spectacular failures—most notably his doomed marriage to the brilliant-but-troubled Mai Kirwan—you’re sucked into a powerful, compelling and achingly sad tale.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The latest novel from Barry (The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty) is a lyrical but ironic period story. Jack McNulty (Eneas's younger brother), of Sligo, Ireland, first appears during WWII, as a soldier in Britain's army, en route to Africa and admiring a peaceful sea, moments before a submarine torpedoes his ship. When we next see him, in 1957, Jack is living in self-imposed exile in Ghana, recalling his days as a soldier and civil servant, and as a suitor, lover, and husband to the haunting and haunted Mai Kirwan. Jack courts Mai avidly; then, after they marry, he gambles away her inheritance and allows creditors to take their house. Having left his two daughters in Ireland, Jack finds a close companion in Ghana: his houseboy, Tom Quaye. Jack must flee the country, however, after a drunken night out with Tom that ends in violence. Even while preparing to leave, Jack's thoughts return to the past: helping his mother research their family's history, defusing unexploded German bombs in England, and working as both a U.N. observer and a gunrunner in Africa. With this complex portrait of a man rooted in his hometown but drawn into a wider warring world, Barry again proves himself a prose artist and a skilled navigator of the rocky shoals of modern morality and Irish heritage.
