This is a superb, moving and poignant story quite rightly in the Booker Shortlist. There are a few very good novels about WW1 and some that get near the mark but to manage to grasp the horrors of war is usually best left to autobiographies. This outstanding novel manages to bring us the horror of the war from a very human perspective with its main character Willie Dunne being a young lad from Dublin who answers the call of king and country against a background of political turmoil in Ireland. He is young and naïve but does his duty when war comes and heads off to France full of confidence but events are moving towards armed conflict right in his home city of Dublin. The Easter rising in 1916 is shown like the war, not full of wide sweeping politics but from the ground in the eyes of someone who doesn't understand politics and expects the status quo to continue as it had for his father. Often in literature the characters are worldly wise and politically savvy yet in real life many many ordinary decent people donÂt know about politics or wider world views  this is the character of Willie Dunne. He always does his best as do those around them but event do overtake him and his friends. The descriptive passages about the trenches are superb and are of a standard IÂve only seen in autobiographies, they are better than in "Birdsong" a novel I liked for its accurate description of the trenches. A gas attack is featured and it is obvious here the author has studied the available writings on the subject and read survivors accounts. But rather than be a sterile account itÂs very human and down to earth with no bravado or sweeping statements, just the nitty-gritty of one lads struggle.

Now it would have been easy for this novel to become overly grim, maudlin and too full of bathos. But I think it avoids this, the Easter rising in 1916 Dublin and the effects on the Irish troops fighting in Flanders are sensitively handled again from the small mans point of view yet the wider picture is brought to the reader especially through the religious angle and Willie DunneÂs own mixed ideas on religion given what he has seen in the trenches. It is a poignant book indeed but in many ways it show a bright side to the human spirit regardless of adversity, it shows the complex story of the Easter rising in a simple down to earth way more in keeping with how it probably affected people at the time rather than in the way just plain facts and figures can.

Beautifully written, its descriptive passages are some of the best IÂve seen on war yet the tenderness between the poor men in the trenches makes this a stunning and thought provoking novel. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and Sebastian Barry has written others that feature the Dunne family  on the strength of this superb book IÂll be looking forward to reading those.