A Thousand Moons

From the twice Booker Prize-shortlisted author Sebastian Barry comes A Thousand Moons, 'a page-turner with heart and soul' (The Times) and the follow-up to the Costa Book of the Year, 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

'A page-turner with heart and soul.' The Times

'[Barry's] work reminds us how much we need these rare gifts of the natural storyteller, for reckoning with our past and present.' Tessa Hadley, Guardian 

'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

'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