A Thousand Moons is a sequel to Days Without End, a novel of the American Civil War as told by Union soldier Thomas McNulty. Thomas and his love, fellow soldier ‘Handsome John Cole’, make a family by adopting/abducting a young Lakota girl who they re-name Winona. A Thousand Moons picks up the story from Winona’s perspective after the war’s end.
Beautifully written and brought this story to life. Feel there's more story to tell and am expecting a third novel in this series.

Three years ago I read Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End which has to be one of the best books I’ve read, so I began reading A Thousand Moons with great anticipation of a good read. I wasn’t disappointed and I loved it. It continues the story of Thomas McNulty and John Cole, and Winona, the young Indian girl they had adopted. It really helps if you have read Days Without End first to understand the characters’ history and relationships and how they got to this stage in their lives.

They are living and working on a farm owned by Lige Magan in Tennessee, about seven miles from a little town called Paris. It is now the 1870s, some years after the end of the Civil War, but the town was still full of rough Union soldiers and vagabonds on every little byway. Dark skin and black hair were enough to get you beaten up – and it wasn’t a crime to beat an Indian. Life wasn’t any better for the other two workers on the farm, black ex-slaves, Rosalee Bouguereau and her brother, Tennyson. These are dangerous times not just in the town but also in the woods outside the town from Zach Petrie’s gang of ‘nightriders’.

Winona remembers little of her early life, beyond seeing in the back of her mind a ‘blackened painting’ of blood and screaming, bayonets, bullets, fire and death. But their lives are full of love at the farm; Winona is loved as a daughter by Thomas and John, who are themselves lovers. She works for lawyer Briscoe as his clerk and ventures into town for supplies, which was where she met Jas Jonski, a young man who declares he wants to marry her. At first she hopes that she might very much like to marry Jas. But, then things go disastrously wrong. First racism rears its ugly head as Jas is white and the Paris townspeople began to talk. As his employer said he thought Jas had gone mad or wicked in some way – ‘to want to go marrying something closer to a monkey than a man’ was how he put it.

And then came the dreadful day when Winona was brutally attacked so badly that she shook for two weeks and something deep within her was shaking a long time after. She can’t remember at first what had actually happened to her, except that she was plied with ‘distillery whiskey’, nor who had carried out the assault. But all the signs pointed to Jas Jonski. Then Tennyson Bouguereau was also attacked, and their peaceful happy life was shattered. Winona set out for revenge. And in so doing she began to remember more about her early life and about her mother, a strong Lakota woman, full of courage and pride.

‘A thousand moons’ was her mother’s deepest measure of time. To her time was ‘a kind of hoop or a circle not a long string and if you walked far enough she said you could find the people still living in the long ago’ – ‘a thousand years all at once’. As she sets off on her quest it is the thought of her mother’s courage that enabled Winona to find her own courage – the ‘courage of a thousand years’.

I just love everything about this book, so beautifully written, rendering the way the characters speak so that I could hear them, and describing the landscape so poetically and lyrically that the scenes unfolded before my eyes; and the characters too, all real people from the American West of the 1870s, as though I was there in their midst. It would make a superb film.

Sebastian Barry is a master of prose and story and having loved the majority of his novels I was eager to get my hands on [book:A Thousand Moons|52215420] and the sequel to [book:Days Without End|30212107]. Unfortunately this was just an ok read for me and didn’t wow me like [book:The Secret Scripture|3419808] or [book:A Long Long Way|379087] and perhaps my expectations was too high.</b> 

I had previously read [book:Days Without End|30212107] a few years ago, it still took me quite a while to connect with the characters of John Cole, Thomas McNulty and Winona, a Lakota girl orphaned and raised by John and Thomas and while this is a sequel, I really struggled to remember what had gone on previously and am not really sure how this would work as a stand alone.

<i>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.</i>

Barry’s prose is always beautiful and yet I struggled with the telling of the story through the character of Winola.  I found it really difficult to stay engaged with this story. 
There is a harshness and brutality about the story and yet Barry leaves quite a lot to the reader’s imagination. 

An ok read but unfortunately not one for my real life bookshelf. 

<i>My Thanks to Net Galley for the opportunity to read this in return for an honest review. </i>

Thanks to NetGalley and Faber & Faber for the Advance Review Copy in exchange for an honest review.

When I requested this book, I had no idea it was a sequel. I mostly hate picking up books if I haven’t read the earlier book(s) but it didn’t seem to really matter with this novel. I haven’t read any of Parry’s previous works, but it is clear he is an extremely talented writer. 

The book tells the tale of Winona, a young Lakota woman who has been adopted by a pair of former soldiers. At the beginning of the story, she suffers a brutal sexual assault of which she remembers little. 

I’d find this book quite difficult to categorise if I had to. It feels very “quiet” if that makes any sense. It’s very much character-driven and the plot is somewhat glacial – think one of those old Westerns where a man sits staring at things or there’s a wide panning shot of the desert that lasts ten minutes. The relationship between the main characters and their family dynamic is the key strength of the novel but it wasn’t enough to really hook me into their story. 

Maybe if I’d read the first book I would have felt more connected to the characters but it all just felt a bit flat and dare I say a bit boring to read.

“If I say that here following are the real events, you will remember that they are described at a great distance from the time of their happening. And that there is no one to agree to or challenge my account, now. Some of it I am inclined to challenge myself, because I say to myself, could that really have happened, and did I really do that? But we only have one path across the mire of remembrance in general.”

A Thousand Moons is the eighth novel by award-winning Irish author, Sebastian Barry, and is the sequel to Days Without End. Later in life, the Lakota woman that Thomas McNulty renamed Winona because he couldn’t pronounce her own name (Ojinjintka) looks back on certain events of the mid-1870s: what occurred after Thomas’s return from serving time at Fort Leavenworth. 

Her disclaimer: “It could be I am talking about things that occurred in Henry County, Tennessee in 1873 or 4, but I have never been so faithful on dates. And if they did occur, there was no true account of them at the time. There were bare facts, and a body, and then there were the real events that no one knew.”

At about seventeen years of age, gainfully employed by the lawyer Briscoe, engaged to be married to Jas Janski, Winona Cole is assaulted after being plied with whiskey. It might be the nineteenth-Century version of date-rape, but her memory is blank, just like when her family were massacred by the army. She can’t say who her attacker was. 

As much as her “family”, Thomas, John Cole, Lige Magan and freed slaves Rosalee and Tennyson Bouguereau, want justice, Winona understands that it can’t be had through the law: assault of an Indian is not considered a crime. After all: “‘An Indian ain’t a citizen and the law don’t apply in the same way,’ said the lawyer Briscoe.” 

While the sheriff warns them off taking their own action, Jas Janksi’s words subsequently see Tennyson badly beaten, and Winona decides she must fight her own battles. And in the midst of one of those, she meets (at the end of a gun) and falls in love with Peg, a Chickasaw girl. But will that help her when she’s standing trial for murder?

Winona is under no illusion about her precarious position in society: “Whitemen in the main just see slaves and Indians. They don’t see the single souls. How all are emperors to those that love them” and “We were nothing to them. I think now of the great value we put on what we were and I wonder what does it mean when another people judge you to be worth so little you were only to be killed? How our pride in everything was crushed so small it disappeared until it was just specks of things floating away on the wind” succinctly illustrate this.

No doubt because of her own history, Winona can also see from the perspective of the disenfranchised Rebel soldiers, despite their Night Raider activities against Union supporters. It’s a talented male author who can make the voice of a 19th Century Lakota orphan sound authentic, but of course, that describes Sebastian Barry perfectly.

He is especially gifted at conveying the love between the members of this makeshift family: “I had the wound of being a lost child. Thing was it was they that healed me, Thomas McNulty and John Cole. They had done their damnedest I guess. So they both gave me the wound and healed it, which is a hard fact in its way” and  “Just because John Cole raised me up as something so gold, he said, that the sun itself was jealous of me, didn’t mean anyone else in the wide world thought that” and “John Cole, the keel of my boat. Thomas the oars and the sails” are examples.

All Barry’s descriptive prose is, of course, exquisite: “A high cold sky was speckled with stray blues and greys like a bird’s egg. But a reluctant sunlight was trying to measure the height of the sky with long thin veins.” “I could feel myself melting away. I thought I was like water but I had no cup to hold me. How small I felt. World didn’t care, I knew that.” Another superlative read.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Faber and Faber.

1870s Paris, Tennessee, a young Lakota girl Ojinjintka, lately known as Winona Cole, travels a delicate path in post-Civil War America. Another 5* book from Sebastian Barry, ‘A Thousand Moons’ is sequel to ‘Days Without End’, though both books can be read independently. This is a dangerous time when the rule of law is often non-existent and hatred is on every street. Winona says, ‘It was a town of many eyes watching you anyhow, an uneasy place.’ Barry tells this heart-rending story in eloquent prose that makes the pages turn.
Winona is the adopted daughter of Thomas McNulty and John Cole, whose wartime story is told in ‘Days Without End’. Now, peace has come and Thomas and John raise their daughter to be educated and respectful. This in itself causes problems. ‘It is bad enough being an Indian without talking like a raven,’ says Winona. ‘The white folks in Paris were not all good speakers themselves.’ 
A story of one young woman’s journey through life’s racism, prejudice and latent violence, this is also a story of love. The love, for its time, of an unusual family; an Indian cared for when her family is killed when she is six years old. Winona finds a new home with Cole and McNulty, living with fellow Civil War soldier Lige Magan on his farm, with two black ex-slaves, cook Rosalee Bouguereau and her farm labourer brother Tennyson. Winona finds a mentor in Lawyer Briscoe, for whom she clerks. What happens next is the catalyst for the story; an event she struggles to understand, to hide. This is a coming-of-age story in which Winona must reconcile her Lakota birth with her childhood and young adulthood in a changing racial world, and also find herself as a woman.
A beautifully written book.
Read more of my book reviews at http://www.sandradanby.com/book-reviews-a-z/

There are recipes which consist of a small number of high quality ingredients that are the best food. Barry's writing style is like that. Good plot+ great characters+ poetic but simple prose+ great narrator's voice= amazing quality book.

Following on from Days Without End, the narrator is Winona ,Ojinjintka originally of the Lakota people. She was adopted by "misfits"  Thomas McNulty and John Cole. Winona is obviously an intelligent young woman who works for a local solicitor . When people are able to see through prejudices and racist beliefs they can see what a special family they are. However they live on the fringes of a community and Winona has to survive an horrific incident. This is compounded by an attack on her good friend because he is black.
Winona sets out to right the wrongs done with bravery, determination and a measure of youthful recklessness.

During this quest she finds both enemies and allies in unlikely places. Will she be able to overcome the racism and prejudice in a "wild west" town which has a narrow  minded and unfair justice which does not respect the "all men are created equal" part of the Constitution?.
Winona is a narrator who makes the book flow quickly by.

I am not sure of the ending and had to ask a friend how they interpreted it. Barry trusts  that to the reader.

Barry's book is flawless. Engaging, moving and it asks us to look beyond out own prejudices to what really matters about being human.

I received an ARC from NetGalley for review.

This is in some ways a historical crime story, centred around the rape of John and Thomas's adopted daughter, a young Lakota girl re-named Winona. The novel is, for the most part, beautiful and kind, but the subject matter is grim and there are moments that struck a false note for me. The theme of the novel is decency and how regardless of circumstances, some see the world with love, and some with hate, and it is done well, but I still had mixed feelings about the plot choices in the end.

Lovely queer families, but a subject matter and voice that Barry wasn't perhaps the best writer to address/speak.

There is a cadence to the writing that needs to be embraced and learned, and then you will see nuggets of words that are so poignant and beautiful. A most interesting story.  Thanks to NetGalley and publisher for ARC.

“I had the wound of being a lost child. Thing was it was they that healed me, Thomas McNulty and John Cole. They had done their damnedest I guess. So they both gave me the wound and healed it, which is a hard fact in its way.”

A Thousand Moons is a sequel of sorts to Days Without End, a novel of the American Civil War as told by Union soldier Thomas McNulty. Thomas and his love, fellow soldier ‘Handsome John Cole’, make a family by adopting/abducting a young Lakota girl who they re-name Winona. A Thousand Moons picks up the story from Winona’s perspective after the war’s end.

Thomas’ narration of the earlier book is warm, openhearted and candid, holding nothing back, but Winona as a narrator is much more closed off. Given her background, it is understandable that she would be guarded, even aloof with the other characters, but she is also frustratingly unreachable for the reader. Barry crafts for her a distinctive voice, in his lyrical way, but somehow we never quite get to know her.

And there seems to be something of a missed opportunity to recast events and characters in a new light—as we are now seeing them through Winona’s very different perspective. Barry expands on the earlier story, for instance by revealing that Winona’s original name is Ojinjintka, but he doesn’t seek to complicate it, instead forging forwards into the simmering volatility of the Reconstruction Era. The plot here is a little muddled, in a way that made it hard to find this novel’s thematic or emotional throughline.

At a sentence level, A Thousand Moons is a pleasure to read, Barry’s prose glides beautifully. There are moments of insight, tenderness and spirit throughout, but it doesn’t quite make a cohesive whole. 3 stars.

This is a very character-driven story and having not read the first book I think I was at a slight disadvantage at the beginning because I had a lot of catching up to do. It didn't take me long to fall in love with all the characters, though, and to want nothing but happiness for the motley found-family. 

I'm still not sure how comfortable I am with a white man from Ireland writing from the perspective of a Native American teenager. Once I realized that the book was being told from her point of view I was ready to be disappointed at best and offended at worst. No one could ever truly write from her point of view, but I have to say despite expecting to be put off I found the narration to be just fine. I still don't think Own Voices should be written by others, but for an old white man this writer did all right. 

The writing style may not be for everyone as it's very ambiguous and stilted, but once I got used to it I found the story flowed well. I wasn't sure what the story was really planning to be other than us seeing into the lives of this wholesome group, but once everything started to click into place toward the end you realized just how much evil was waiting for them just under the surface. 

I became very invested in this story and its characters, so much so that I'm going to go buy the first installment. I hope that there are more books in this series because I definitely need more of this family. 

Full review to come on my blog!

We first meet the character  Winona in Days without End, Sebastian Barry’s 2016 novel, and I recommend that book also, it is not imperative to have read that before reading ‘A Thousand Moons’.   Winona is a Lakota native American living with John Cole and Thomas McNulty on land owned by Lige Magan near Paris, Tennessee.    An unconventional family of sorts surrounds Winona as she struggles to comprehend violence both against her and Tennyson Bouguereau, a former slave who also lives with his sister Rosalee, on the land.   A personal odyssey of sorts sees Winona confront many enemies, as she matures and finds love of her own.   Sebastian Barry’s prose is both delicate and heavy with intent and meaning.  Another 5 stars.

This is a book full of beautiful writing (I swear Barry writes with the loveliest of Irish lilts in his words) and terrible events. The contrast could feel discordant but it is washed over by the love that the members of this non-blood family feel for each other. Each of them is capable of anger and violence but, as a group, they have a strength and warmth which shows them, and us, that love and co-operation can always triumph over division and hatred in the end. A fabulous book with a lot to say about not judging others by skin colour, racial heritage, class or sexual orientation.

A Thousand Moons continues the story of John Cole and Thomas McNulty but told from the point of view of Winona, the orphaned Indian girl they adopted. Although A Thousand Moons can be read as a standalone, I think you would be missing a literary treat in not reading Days Without End.

In a recent Faber Members’ Q&A, Sebastian Barry was asked if, when he completed Days Without End, he knew at that point he would write Winona’s story from her point of view in his next novel. He said he didn’t think so, partly because he wouldn’t dare to think he could, being in his words “a straight, white, old, Irish man”. However, he describes how Winona seemed to decide it for him, creeping very quietly into his workroom and instructing him to start. He said, “I borrowed a smidgen of her great courage and did.”

I think in that answer Sebastian Barry sums up his key achievement in A Thousand Moons, that of creating a distinctive and engaging narrative voice for Winona and communicating her resolve to take control of her life.  For the latter, she calls on the legacy of her mother and her Lakota heritage, recalling “Oh, but was I not the niece of a great leader, and the daughter of a warring woman?” And she has need of that courage when a dramatic event occurs which she scarcely understands but which she senses threatens the safety of the life John and Thomas have made for themselves.

“I come from the saddest story that ever was on the earth.  I’m one of the last to know what was taken from me and what was there before it was taken.” Along with everything she’s endured up until now, Winona has no illusions about her low status and the prejudice (and worse) she still faces. “The world wanted bad things to happen to Indian girls.” As she learns, an Indian isn’t regarded as a citizen and therefore has no protection from the law.

What I particularly liked about the book is the heartfelt, wise and non-judgmental view Winona gives the reader of the loving relationship between John Cole and Thomas McNulty.  “Their love was the first commandment of my world – Thou shalt hope to love like them.”  There is also a fabulous set of secondary characters all of whom, like Winona, Thomas and John, are in some way outsiders. Theses including Lige Magan, owner of the farm and Rosalee Bougereau and her brother, Tennyson, both ex-slaves.    A particularly lovely scene is the celebrations on the farm for Whit Monday when having feasted on roast sucklin pig, Lige picks up his fiddle, Thomas McNulty dons a dress from his performing days, Rosalee sings songs and Winona performs Lakota dances. It’s a time, Winona reflects, “when love was palpable between us. And the way that John Cole touched Thomas”s back as the two of them stood watching in the long shadows of May.”

Thomas and John’s love is also directed towards Winona, for which she is daily grateful, musing “How was I so lucky to have these good-as-women men?”  However, the reader is reminded there can be a good and bad side to everyone. As depicted in Days Without End, Thomas and John were both soldiers involved in violence against the Lakota tribe. Yet they also killed to protect Winona and took her in to become part of their unconventional ‘family’.

As you might expect from a book by Sebastian Barry there is some wonderful writing.  For example, Winona’s description of herself as “a fragment, a torn leaf, torn away from the plains” or her description of her ‘mother and father’ (as she has come to think of them), “John Cole, the keel of my boat. Thomas the oars and the sails.”

There is a lot to love about A Thousand Moons.  My one slight reservation was I found the way the repercussions of the dramatic event referred to earlier was wrapped up a little rushed and unconvincing. However, the final scene was everything I hoped for.

Sebastian Barry is a master of storytelling.  His characters fall fully formed from the page as living, breathing creations with all their humanity so beautifully conjured.  A Thousand Moons is equally as perfectly written as his other tales but for some reason I found this a harder book to get into than his others.  I think this may have been more to do with me and my frame of mind and I am glad I persisted with it but I'm not sure I finished it with a sense of being sated by it.

Irish author Sebastian Barry’s last novel “Days Without End” (2016) won the Costa Book Of The Year and I read it when it made the 2017 Booker longlist. I enjoyed its unlikely coupling of the two main characters and its “adventure tale of battlegrounds, survival and injustices meted out towards the non-white populations of the developing America” but was a little put off by the present-tense narrative. I was fascinated to hear that Barry was to revisit his characters in what is loosely a sequel to its predecessor. This was one of the titles I focused in on as wanting to read in my start of year Looking Back Looking Forward post.
The main character here is Native American Winona. I had highlighted her and the relationship with Thomas McNulty and John Cole, her adoptive parents, as one of the strengths of “Days Without End” so I was looking forward to her (not present tense) narrative. After the years of wandering and adapting to their environment in the first novel the main characters have settled as farm workers in Tennessee. Their world has very much shrunk and the two men do fade into the background a little here becoming supporting characters and that is disappointing.
Winona’s life consists of risking the antipathy of the local town population because of her heritage in her trips to assist the local lawyer. A young man who works in the dry-goods store, Jas Jonski, takes a shine to Winona and that is where her troubles begin. It’s far less of an adventure tale but the need for survival and the suffering of injustice are once again present and Winona is a positively vibrant and complex character, who like her adoptive parents challenges stereotypes.
As one would expect of an artist of Barry’s calibre it is very well written but for me it just seems to simmer along and never really takes off in the way the last novel did. I missed the epic sweep of that book.
It may be because it is a much quieter novel anyway but given these characters and what we have had from them in the past this quietness was surprising and on this reading just a little disappointing.

Following on from 'Days Without End', this novel is told from Winona's point of view. With the end of the American civil war John Cole and Thomas McNulty have left their fighting (and theatrical) days behind them and settled down in Tennessee on Lige Magan's tobacco farm with Winona, their adopted Lakota Indian daughter. Together with freed slaves Tennyson and Rosalee Bouguereau, this odd assembly have formed a family of sorts and work the farm together. Winona is now grown and educated in writing and arithmetic and has a job with a kind and liberal minded lawyer keeping his books. She even has an admirer, Jas Jonski, who she has agreed to marry, although he is not liked by any of her family.

Despite her stable and contented home, life is still harsh for Winona with the farm barely scratching a living, racism rife and violent men released from the army roaming the country. Both Winona and Tennyson are attacked and beaten in incidents where they couldn't identify the attackers, leading to a series of events that erupt in violence and threaten the safety of Winona's existence.

Told with Barry's unique, lyrical and emotive prose, this is a tale of love and hate as Winona seeks justice for herself and Tennyson. She very much values the kindness and fairness of the lawyer Briscoe as well as the love and compassion she receives from Thomas and John and the love they have for each other ("Their love was the first commandment of my world - Thou shalt hope to love like them."). She is also coming to terms with her heritage and what she remembers of life with her mother and their tribe and realises this is an important part of herself. Although written on a less grand scale than 'Days Without Ends', this heartfelt novel gives a fine feel of the troubled times of that particular period of post civil war history and the courage and spirit of its most deprived people.

This is outstandingly good.  I thought Days Without End was brilliant; A Thousand Moons is even better, I think.

Told in the first person by Winona, the Lakota Native American girl we met in Days Without End, it is the story of the immediately post-Civil War events in West Tennessee where they have settled on Lige Magan’s farm.  Barry conjures the atmosphere of the time as pre-war attitudes to race and slavery begin to re-assert themselves and continues to create fine, believable characters and an enthralling story.

What makes this really special, though, is Winona’s narrative voice.  It is a wonderful mix of the lyrical and poetic which she has gained from her education and reading with the slightly rough, idiosyncratic dialect of Tennessee at that time.  I found it riveting, both in what she says and how she says it.

This is definitely one of my books of the year so far and one of the best things I have read for some considerable time.  Very warmly recommended.

(My thanks to Faber & Faber for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Sebastian Barry’s 2016 novel, Days Without End, would, without any doubt, stand very high in any top 10 list of all time reads I might ever be asked to compile. I have said it before and I am willing to say it again, I think that book is word perfect. His most recent novel, A Thousand Moons, continues the story of John Cole, Thomas McNulty and their adoptive daughter, Winona, who are still living and working on the farmstead owned by Lige Magan, alongside freedmen, brother and sister, Rosalee and Tennyson Bouguereau.

Each in their own way harbours an identity which is an anathema to the majority of those in their community.  John and Thomas are homosexual, Rosalee and Tennyson are black and Winona is a Lakota Indian. And, of course, in the previous novel they were all involved in the killing (in self defence) of Tach Petrie, hardly an upstanding member of the local fraternity, but certainly a power in it.

While the previous novel focused primarily on John and Thomas, this book centres itself around Winona. Having been taught to both read and write and to figure her numbers by Mrs Neale, Winona is able to find work with Lawyer Briscoe in the local town. Although she finds the job fulfilling and the money that it brings in is much needed, her position calls her to the attention of those who have an in-bred contempt for her and her people. One young man, however, Jas Jonski, is seriously attracted to her and pays court to the point of seeing himself as her fiancé. For her part, Winona goes along with this until one disastrous evening, the events of which leave her both physically and psychologically damaged. From this point on, not only Winona but her entire family are threatened by the consequences of that one night, and the challenge that their way of life is seen as posing to the local community means that they and all those who offer support become vulnerable to smalltown vigilantes.

While the plot of this book is engrossing and marches on apace, like all Barry’s work it is about so much more than simply the events that take place. Chief of these, perhaps, is the question of identity. Although she is deeply embedded in the family unit centred on John Cole and Thomas McNulty, Winona is at all times conscious of the fact that the life she is living compromises the identity into which she was born. Much as he loves her it is Thomas who begins this process by changing her name.

I am Winona.

In early times I was Ojinjintka, which means rose. Thomas McNulty tried very hard to say this name, but he failed, and so he gave me my dead cousin‘s name because it was easier in his mouth. Winona means first-born. I was not first-born.
If one’s name is essential to one’s identity, then so to is one’s language. Returned temporarily to her people Winona discovers that she

couldn’t conversed with them. I remember sitting in the teepee with the other women and not being able to answer them. By that time I was all of thirteen or so. After a few days I found the words again. The women rushed forward and embraced me as though I had only just arrived to them that very moment. Only when I spoke our language could they really see me.
This isn’t only true when she returns to her original home, but has its parallel in Tennessee.

To present yourself in a dry goods store to buy items you have got to have the best English or something else happens.
Throughout the course of the novel, Winona discovers more and more about who she essentially is, until at the end, despite being in the direst of situations she takes her future into her own hands and forbids the rest of her ‘family’ from coming to her aid.

If identity is one of these books major themes, then the concept of time is another, especially as it is viewed by different cultures. This is very much influences the way that people see the relationship between themselves and eternity. Winona speaks of “the whiteman’s strict straight line” through life to the end. Whereas for the Lakota there is no past, present, or future

time was a kind of hoop or circle...if you walk far enough...you could find the people who had lived in the long ago.
How you envisage time, and the end of your time here on earth, inevitably affects how you see yourself, your identity, your relationship to the people and events around you.

And the book is also about the concept of justice and how justice relates to truth. Justice and truth are poor bedfellows in the Tennessee of the 1870s. There is little hope of justice for those who are in anyway seen as different.

You only had to look like you done something wrong in America and they would hang you, if you were poor.
To that you can add if you were black, homosexual, or from any of the first nation races.

A Thousand Moons is a superb piece of writing.  There is almost no limit to the number of beautifully expressed passages that I could quote as an example of this; one will have to suffice.

The land was trying to loosen itself from the royal heat of summer.
If I wasn’t as overwhelmed by it as I was by Days Without End then that is probably because I wasn’t as engaged by Winona as I was by Thomas and John in the previous novel. However, I’m sure that for many readers the opposite will be true. I can’t recommend it strongly enough, my only caveat being that if you haven’t read the earlier book you really do need to do so in order to place the characters and what happens to them in a complete perspective.

With thanks to Faber & Faber and NetGalley for a review copy of this novel.

A sequel to Days without End, this new novel from Sebastian Barry continues with the story of Irish emigrants to the American West, Thomas McNulty and his partner John Cole. The action has moved on to the 1870s and this time the story is narrated by Winona, the Native American girl they adopted in the previous book. Winona is now a young woman and the “family” have settled down on a tobacco farm in Tennessee. Winona is clever, educated and has a job with an unusually, for the time, unprejudiced lawyer, Briscoe, who is working for reconstruction after the Civil War and the American Indian Wars. Against a background of continuing racial tension and violence, the happy household finds itself threatened by events beyond its control. I enjoyed this book much more than Days without End, which just didn’t quite work for me. Here I found Winona’s voice more compelling and convincing than McNulty’s in the earlier book and the storyline itself more convincing. Some aspects of the plot felt too contrived, and in one instance, to do with Winona later in the book, unnecessary and seemingly tacked on. But overall it’s an absorbing tale of a group of unusual and original characters bringing life to an almost too familiar setting which draws the reader in right from the start.