Sebastian Barry | 'It’s terrifying, but fascinating that human groups have these impulses' | The Bookseller

The protagonist and narrator is Thomas McNulty, orphaned during Ireland's Great Famine, who takes the dangerous sea voyage to Canada and starts out on a new life in America while still just a boy. After meeting another young wanderer, John Cole, the two find ways to survive together, first as boy dancers playing the part of young women to entertain love-starved miners, and later travelling as soldiers on the Oregon Trail from Missouri, amid battles with the Sioux. Barry says the novel travelled in a very different direction to the one he had begun with. He first spent nine months writing a long chapter about the famine in Ireland, and he thought that the book would be "very, very dark". But then he found himself cutting that chapter down to just a page and a half, and wondering what was going to come next. "Wonderfully, out of that private box of miracles that is a writer's life, I just wrote that sentence [that now opens the book]: "The method of laying out a corpse in Missouri sure took the proverbial cake."