Days Without End

His new book, The Newer World, is a sweeping yet intimate novel about one man's life in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Some of the characters in the novel appeared in his previous award-winning novels, Days Without End and A Thousand Moons, which he also talks about in this episode.

We began the interview with me asking Sebastian Barry this question.

I'm just curious.

But he doesn't...

That's the reason he has to leave his home place.

Because in the 1870s, as you know, sort of... after emancipation the turning of the south back to itself as it were is an enormous engine and the people who hate him for what they think he has done are becoming powerful again so the lord one of the other characters the lawyer briscoe obliges him to leave in that way he has a relationship you know if if you consider now these are 10 books Days Without End is where Tennyson first appears on the farm when Thomas and John reach it.

And then A Thousand Moons is the book of Winona, their sort of adopted daughter, who is a 17 year old Lakota girl.

I'm your host, Daniel Ford.

We first talked to Sebastian Barry, the much-heralded Irish author, back in 2017 when he was promoting his novel, Days Without End.

It was right around the time we were really figuring out what the show was and how it should flow and sound, and I still go back to it for inspiration for both writing and producing.

I'll include a link to that episode in our show notes.

and we do talk about the book of course but we also dive into the beauty and the magic and the mystery of storytelling that's a theme we've been exploring since the early days of the podcast and I'm not sure it's ever been as beautifully articulated as it has in our upcoming conversation Even if the underlying assumption and conclusion is that we really don't know what the hell happens when we decide to put pen to paper and it turns into a story people identify strongly with and want to reread and share and spin into their own stories.

So I'll get you right to Sebastian Barry after sharing a few biographical highlights.

He's the author of the aforementioned Days Without End, Old God's Time, A Thousand Moons, and The Whereabouts of Enos McNulty.

He's been long and shortlisted for the Booker Prize multiple times, and his work has won numerous awards in Ireland, the UK, and France.

Today, I'm delighted to be joined in the studio by the multi-award-winning Irish author Sebastian Barry.

Sebastian, who was the laureate for Irish fiction from 2018 to 2021, is a two-time winner of both the Costa Book of the Year and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, and he's been nominated a remarkable five times for the Booker Prize, including three short listings for his novels A Long, Long Way, The Secret Scripture, and Days Without End.

That latter novel was set in Civil War-era America, and his latest work, The Newer World, which we're talking about today, explores the same time and territory, and some of the same characters, in its story of a freed man forced to leave behind the only home he's ever known.

Sebastian Barry, welcome to Take Four Books.

You're here to talk about your new novel, The Newer World, and the three works that influenced it, and you've picked a diary account written by the colonel who led the first regiment of formerly enslaved men, one of the best-selling educational books of all time, and a mid-19th century travelogue through America's Deep South.

But before we get to those, let's start with your latest novel, The Newer World.

This is your third exploration of the years before and after America's Civil War, after previous works Days Without End and A Thousand Moons.

What is it that keeps bringing you back to this time period and this subject?

The McNultys and the Dunnes come into it again and again.

And then in 2016, in his novel Days Without End, he took one sort of throwaway line from a family story about a relative who headed to America in one of the so-called coffin ships that were fleeing the Irish famine, and he wove a whole novel around it, and then he stayed in America for the novel A Thousand Moons, and now he's returned to some of those same characters in this new book, The Newer World.

So this is a sequel, or do you need to have read those earlier books? What's-

Look, I think it wouldn't hurt to be familiar with the world, but it does work on its own, particularly because you're in a very different voice and perspective to those earlier novels.

But yes, this story, as, you know, as Kate was saying, this isn't part of a, a series, but it's rather...

I think Barry himself has described it as a series of novels that overlap each other.

The central voice of this one is that of Tennyson Boudreaux, who has appeared previously in Days Without End and A Thousand Moons as a smaller character, but this is the opportunity for us to get to know his story.

Tennyson is born a slave in 1840s Tennessee, and he's freed after the Civil War, but as he says in his own wonderful voice, I mean, the voice of Tennyson throughout this book is just extraordinary in this first person narration of a life.

[laughs] He lives in your head.

He di- he does because he, he turned up in 2015 in Days Without End.

He was down on Large Magen's farm down in Tennessee, near Paris, Tennessee, and, uh, there he was with his sister Rosalie.

Um, had a smaller role to play in that book.

And now in, in the army he's pitted in violence against, uh, the Indian, the Native Americans.

Exactly.

This is a through line from Days Without End, isn't it?

Yes.

And I remember, for example, the novelist Sebastian Barry saying, you know, you have to consider that what you're writing is just a pile of malodorous nonsense.

And when he finished his phenomenal book, Days Without End, he told me he put it, you know, he sent it to his agent and said to his wife, I don't think the public's going to like this.

I think I'm going to have to write another novel next year.

Well, it turned out he won the Costa Prize for the second time, the first time anybody'd done that.