Recently lionized for his play The Steward of Christendom, Sebastian Barry was hailed by The New York Times for his "rare mark of theatrical greatness." The New Yorker called the play "a majestic work." Now, with this astounding first novel, he enters the territory of Frank McCourt and James Joyce.When Barry's hero, the romantic innocent Eneas McNulty, signs up to fight with the British in World War I. An Ireland wracked by the Troubles blacklists him as a traitor--and it is his childhood friend, Jonno, who has been ordered to assassinate him. He is pursued by IRA hit men across a lifetime, to Texas, Nigeria, Omaha Beach, and the remote Isle of Man. A modern-day Aeneas, he is a classical hero disguised beneath an ordinary, tragicomic life. His wanderings embody both the strife and glory of Ireland's history, in a book that, as the Irish Times wrote of his famous play, is "wonderful...lyrical and profound, extremely funny, extraordinarily observant...hauntingly sad.