Sebastian Barry's novel Days without End made me suspend my routines in order to devour it.
Very young teenager Thomas McNulty of Sligo, Ireland, orphaned by the Great Famine of the 1840s, stows away on a coffin ship to fearful Canada, makes his way to America and seeking shelter from a rainstorm in Missouri, dives under a hedge where he encounters young teenager John Cole who is also fleeing hunger on his father's exhausted Massachusetts farm.
The two boys team up in order to survive, fall into work as dancing partners dressed as women for miners in a saloon until their maturation catches up with them and they are no longer viable in the role. Again driven by hunger, the 17-year olds join the army in 1851 and find themselves subject to the great hardships of soldiers' lives and embroiled in the atrocities of the Indian Wars and later the Civil War.
Thomas tells us "John Cole was my love, all my love."
Thomas McNulty's distinctive voice in Sebastian Barry's lyrical prose lured me into avidly following their epic lives together over more than two decades of sickeningly cruel violence and peaceful familial periods. I often feared the worst for them, though the threats to them are not responses to their relationship, a relationship which they never question.
Sebastian Barry is a prize-winning Irish writer, Days Without End was inspired by his 16-year old's coming out and his immediate acceptance. The book is dedicated to him.