Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10633 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 292 pages

Review
"'The story grips, shocks and saddens; but most importantly refuses to be forgotten.' The Times 'A stunning achievement... Barry has written one of the most moving fictional accounts of war that surely must rank alongside those real-life testimonies of Owen and Sasson.' Sunday Tribune 'A deeply moving story of courage and fidelity.' J. M. Coetzee"

Sunday Times
'A beautifully written book with human value.'

The Times
'The story grips, shocks and saddens; but most importantly refuses to be forgotten.'

Customer Reviews

A superbly crafted novel
I'm not really one for war novels but was drawn to this because of its focus on Irish soldiers fighting in the Great War against the backdrop of the Easter Rising in their own country (I'm Irish myself) and because it was nominated for the Booker Prize. I whizzed through 'The Da Vinci Code' before this (well, I thought it was about time that I knew what people were going on about) and found it a blessed relief to savour the poetic prose of Sebastian Barry's novel after the dross of Dan Brown's. Barry describes interactions and interiority with poetic insight, so much so that I re-read many passages, just to taste properly all that they had to offer. However, some of his graphic descriptions of the field of battle are stomach-churning - and so they should be. In Willie Dunne, he creates a deeply empathic character whose growing sense of out-of-placeness and disillusionment with the discourses of war build incrementally across the novel. I found the end both shocking and deeply moving. This is a superbly crafted book that I would recommend unreservedly.

A book to read again
I read this book a few months ago and when I finished it I felt I had to read it again to capture some of the powerful descriptions of human feelings, love, fear, confusion, betrayal, disappointment, compradeship, etc., I picked it up again last week and have enjoyed reading every page of it a second time.
In this book Sebastian Barry has dealt with a subject rarely even talked about until recently in Ireland. That is, the dilemna of 1916 when Irishmen were fighting against Britain in Dublin while at the same time Irishmen were fighting in WW1.
This is the human side of that dilemna. As Colm Toibin says on the cover of the book "This is Sebastian Barry's song of innocence and experience composed with poetic grace and eye, both unflinching and tender, for savage detail and moments of pure beauty. It is also an astonishing display of Barry's gift for creating a memorable character, whome he has written, indelibly, back into a history which continues to haunt us".

Evokes pain and sorrow
I don't like using big words when describing books. But I think I will have to do it this time around. A Long Long Way is one of the best novels I have read in a long time. Let me explain.

I've long been interested in fiction that takes place in a war or is in someway related to a war situation. At first because of the action, but as I grew up I liked to read about how people react in a war situation. Following Willie Dunne's ordeals I felt so many pains, so many sorrows. Sebastian Barry shows great depth in describing both the conflicts of war but more importantly the agonies of war, the fear and hopes of the soldiers. I'm not a big fan of poetry. But in this case I think the fact that Sebastian Barry is a poet as well as a novelist and dramatist may explain why his style is so good, so capable of conveying emotion (mind you I haven't read any of his poetry).

A Long Long Way is perhaps the best novel I've read in a long time. If I try to categorize it as war fiction it tops all the books I´ve read recently (Doctorow's The March - good -, Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried - very good -) and war related fiction such as Gunther Grass's Crabwalk - very good - and Ismail Kadare's General of the Dead Army - somewhat disappointing.