ABBEY'S BOOKSELLER PICK ----- I adore Barry's writing, he has such a way with words that often I stop and re-read sentences for the sheer beauty and perfection of them! This new novel follows the story of Winona, the Lakota girl who was adopted by Thomas McNulty and John Cole, protagonists of Barry's last book Days Without End. She is much-loved and treated with great respect by her ragtag adoptive family, and as an educated girl works for the local lawyer. But a pretty girl in a rough town isn't always treated so kindly (and certainly not an Indian one) and though a young man persuades her of his affections, there is not always enough protection against the prejudices of society. A traumatic incident leaves her struggling to understand what happened, but in that conflict she learns who she truly is… Powerful, involving and lyrical prose, another satisfying book from this brilliant author. Lindy Jones
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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 gorgeous, lyrical 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, so that you come out of whatever he writes like you've been away, in another climate.' - Ali Smith