The temporary gentleman

Jack McNulty is a "temporary" gentleman, an Irishman whose appointment in the British army during the Second World War was never permanent. His marital happiness with Mai Kirwan, the most beautiful girl in Sligo, is also short-lived. After many wanderings, as a soldier, engineer and observer for the United Nations, Jack finally ends up in Accra, where he decides to put his erratic life story on paper.

Sebastian Barry is steadily working on a series of novels that can be read independently of each other, in which he closely follows one family, his own, and in this way maps out the twentieth-century history of Ireland and the Irish. In our language area, more than 35,000 of his books have already found their way to readers.