Homesick for Tennessee: The Newer World, by Sebastian Barry, reviewed
From our UK edition
‘I am become a name,’ Alfred Tennyson has Ulysses declare in his 1833 poem, an epigraph that sets up Sebastian Barry’s return to 19th-century America and the imagined world of his ancestors, the McNulty clan, one of modern literature’s greatest creations. The Newer World is the third in a trio of novels to feature Thomas McNulty, one of Barry’s forefathers, who swapped Ireland’s great famine for fighting in the Indian wars and the American civil war. It follows Days Without End and A Thousand Moons, which both explore similar territory and contain many of the same characters, although each book stands alone.
