A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry

A Long Long Way

Sebastian Barry

Don't think anything else of value can be written in a novel about the First World War? Wrong! This is a sad, elegiac, heart-rending account of a baffled Irish soldier fighting in the trenches and in Dublin during the Easter Rebellion. Yeats was right. A terrible beauty has been born. This book proves it.

Extract
The only thing different now was that when Willie sang too mightily he felt a dire need to cough. It was the little bit of gas remaining, he thought, in his chest, some little whirling marble of wretched gas that was upsetting his means of singing.
Parallels
  • Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
  • All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
  • Regeneration by Pat Barker
Borrow this book
Violence
Explicit sexual content

A terrible beauty