February 2015 Book of the Month.
Like Roddy Doyle, Sebastian Barry is one of those great Irish writers whose characters get under your skin and whose stories stay with you forever. The Temporary Gentleman is the third book very loosely charting the lives of the McNulty brothers, and even more loosely based on the stories Barry’s grandfather told him about the war. Jack McNulty is far from the most reliable of narrators and this lyrical tale is full of plenty of twists, of memory as well as life, as Jack remembers back through his life and where it all went wrong.
| Primary Genre | Modern and Contemporary Fiction |
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Jack McNulty is a 'temporary gentleman', an Irishman whose commission in the British army in the Second World War was never permanent. In 1957, sitting in his lodgings in Accra, he urgently sets out to write his story. He feels he cannot take one step further, or even hardly a breath, without looking back at all that has befallen him. He is an ordinary man, both petty and heroic, but he has seen extraordinary things. He has worked and wandered around the world - as a soldier, an engineer, a UN observer - trying to follow his childhood ambition to better himself. And he has had a strange and tumultuous marriage. Mai Kirwan was a great beauty of Sligo in the 1920s, a vivid mind, but an elusive and mysterious figure too. Jack married her, and shared his life with her, but in time she slipped from his grasp. A heart-breaking portrait of one man's life - of his demons and his lost love - The Temporary Gentleman is, ultimately, a novel about Jack's last bid for freedom, from the savage realities of the past and from himself.
The Temporary Gentleman features in the following genres: Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Books of the Month, Historical Fiction, eBooks of the Month, General Fiction, Fiction, Recommendations
The Temporary Gentleman is available in Paperback, Hardback
The Temporary Gentleman was written by Sebastian Barry and published by Faber & Faber Fiction an imprint of Faber & Faber
The Temporary Gentleman has 310 pages
£8.99
