A Thousand Moons

From the Costa Book of the Year-winning author of Days Without End

Even when you come out of bloodshed and disaster in the end you have got to learn to live.

Winona is a young Lakota orphan adopted by former soldiers Thomas McNulty and John Cole.
Living with Thomas and John on the farm they work in 1870s Tennessee, she is educated and loved, forging a life for herself beyond the violence and dispossession of her past. But the fragile harmony of her unlikely family unit, in the aftermath of the Civil War, is soon threatened by a further traumatic event, one which Winona struggles to confront, let alone understand.

Told in Sebastian Barry's rare and masterly prose, A Thousand Moons is a powerful, moving study of one woman's journey, of her determination to write her own future, and of the enduring human capacity for love.

'Nobody writes like, nobody takes lyrical risks like, nobody pushes the language, and the heart, and the two together, quite like Sebastian Barry does.' ALI SMITH

His work reminds us how much we need these rare gifts of the natural storyteller, for reckoning with our past and present. -- Tessa Hadley ? Guardian

Sebastian Barry writes about unconditional love better than anyone else I have ever read. Ever. -- Melissa Harrison

A page-turner with heart and soul ... Like all of Barry's best fiction, it examines life from an angle that makes it look as fresh as a new moon. -- Robert Douglas Fairhurst ? The Times

Stunning . . . Brutal, believable and breathtakingly beautiful. ? Attitude

Horrifying, thrilling and enchanting in equal measure, all of it rendered in Barry's uniquely lyrical prose, which seems at once effortless and dense with meaning... prose this good is a kind of enchantment, transcending the constructs that are supposed to define us to speak in a voice that is truly universal. -- Alex Preston ? Observer

One of Sebastian Barry's extraordinary gifts as a writer is his boundless capacity for empathy, for inhabiting the skin, nerves and mouths of characters the river of history tends to wash away ... This attention to the stories of individual figures within broader generations has created a humane and textured history of the Irish nation and its emigrant experiences. -- Susan Cahill ? Irish Times

Barry is the Laureate for Irish Fiction, but he is also the laureate of empathy... an extraordinary achievement. ? Sunday Independent (Ireland)

Barry is an extraordinary descriptive writer ... There's a quiet glow of brightness - here are unexpected stories of love and respect. But, ultimately, theirs is a world "so knotted with evil that good could only hope to unknot a tiny few threads of it". -- Francesca Carington ? Sunday Telegraph

Barry is a masterly craftsman . his writing is better than ever. Days Without End and A Thousand Moons are equally marvellous; together, one of the finest achievements of contemporary fiction. -- Allan Massie ? Scotsman

It's the writing that puts Barry on the side of the angels ... The inner lives of the characters shine with a timeless quality ... Halfway through this novel I was so much under Barry's spell I wanted to read everything he'd ever written. -- Diana Hendry ? Spectator

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