I love being given the opportunity to update our school library which is a unique space for both senior students and staff to access high quality literature. This is definitely a must-buy. It kept me absolutely gripped from cover to cover and is exactly the kind of read that just flies off the shelves. It has exactly the right combination of credible characters and a compelling plot thatI just could not put down. This is a great read that I couldn't stop thinking about and it made for a hugely satisfying read. I'm definitely going to order a copy and think it will immediately become a popular addition to our fiction shelves. 10/10 would absolutely recommend.

A moving story dealing with race, gender, sexuality, and finding one’s place in the world. I’d recommend this book to anyone wanting a heart-felt, character-driven story set in the heart of Tennessee.

A Thousand Moons is a classic from writer Sebastian Barry. It follows his usual writing style of being poignant and poetic, while bringing to life the narrator’s voice through their dialect.

Also in true Barry style, it explores a number of deep and meaningful topics. In a way, it’s a coming-of-age story as our narrator loses what innocence she has left: the horrors of her childhood may be in the past, but new ones have followed her into adulthood.

A Thousand Moons follows Winona, a Lakota orphan adopted by two soldiers. Winona knows hardship having lost her entire tribe as a child, but has grown up surrounded by a loving family. As she blossoms into a young woman, she has hope for the future: she has a job, people she cares for and even a marriage proposal to contemplate.

But this is a time and a place besieged by prejudices, grudges and lawlessness. Attacks and violence are rife and Winona’s path deviates from the stability she thought she knew. New friends and lovers are introduced, while old acquaintances show their true colours. Winona must discover what she’s capable of, or be a pawn for lesser men to play as they please.

This is a story - one young woman telling her tale and experiences as she makes her way through a world determined to look down on her. It transported me to that time and place; you’re there with those characters as they fight fires and hunt for justice. The local dialogue works to take you there - even if it took a little getting used to when you first start out.

Despite the action, it’s a slow-paced and moving story. It’s a character-driven tale, but the characters are engaging, and you care for Winona especially very quickly. My knowledge of this time period is non-existent so I can’t comment on the historical accuracy of Barry’s writing, but I adored the different representations showcased in a fairly short book.

A Thousand Moons is a gentle and moving read, touching on topics that stay with you long after you’ve finished the book. If you’re a fan of Barry, interested in this time period or want a book with a unique narration, then I’d recommend checking this out.

This is a sequel to Days Without End that revisits the lives of John Cole, Thomas McNulty, and Winona, Great sequel, with excellent writing, and characterization.

A sequel to Days Without End which revisits the lives of John Cole and Thomas McNulty but also Winona, McNulty's adopted daughter. It is well written as expected but also an excellent story.

A Thousand Moons follows on from Days Without End, but can be enjoyed as a stand alone novel. The story is told from the perspective of Winona, a Native American girl who was adopted by Thomas McNulty a US soldier who fought in the Civil War. Winona faces continual racism in her adopted hometown, despite being accepted by many local people. When she is violently assaulted and is left with no memory of the attack, the storyline offers up clues as to who may be responsible.
Sebastian Barry has a beautiful writing style and despite covering difficult issues, the book also provides humour and proof that love can help us through the most tragic situations.

Wow. This book will be a classic in the years to come.
Sebastian Barry has such beautiful grasp of the English language that elevates this story to the level of the angels. This lyrical book has such a gentle yet all-encompassing command of emotion and sentiment.

The core characters are described with such delicacy, intimacy and articulation that you can't help but to fall in love with them. This is difficult to achieve with even one character; Barry manages it with Winona Cole, Thomas McNulty, John Cole, Lige Magan, Rosalee and Tennyson Bourgeareau, Peg and the lawyer Briscoe.

As we follow Winona and her family through the intricacy of their lives, especially during Winona's courtcase for her wrongful conviction, we grow such an intimate bond with all of them. It is clear that they have full lives, emotions and thoughts outside of those that are woven into the story, and their lives will continue, full of trials and tribulations, long after the book is ended.

This is the kind of storytelling that immediately goes straight to your heart, and makes me want to read everything else Sebastian Barry has read - highly recommend!

What an absolute pleasure to meet again with Thomas McNulty and John Cole in this follow-up to Days Without End, although A Thousand Moons focuses primarily on their adoptive daughter Winona. You have to be called Sebastian Barry to be able to impersonate a young Indian girl with such authenticity. A Thousand Moons is a true page-turner, a visceral indictment of injustice (against Indians, against women, against the poor) but one that, like Days Without End, shines with the light of those who represent hope and goodness in the face of the injustices of the world.

Absolutely adored "Days Without End" so when I saw that I could request "A Thousand Moons" I did do without a second thought; I definitely did not regret it. Barry's prose is beautiful, delicate and intimate and although I struggled with reading the story through Winona's perspective, the novel was overall engaging and an absolute page-turner.

I really wanted to love this book, given the premise and the ideas. However, I have to say I didn't really enjoy it. The prose is quite dense, perhaps indicative of the time period in which the book is set, and I appreciate this. However, such is its density, I found it hard to fully engage with the story, which is where my 3-star rating comes in. I can appreciate Barry's skills, and the historical references, very much like in 'Days Without End' - the first book. Despite this, I am left feeling a little disappointed - but I recognise that not everyone will love a book, regardless of the reviews it carries. I hope others feel more positively about this read.

Thank you Netgalley and the publisher for allowing me to review this book, all opinions are my own.

From the get-go, I was intrigued, but as the story went on I couldn't help but think something was missing or things could've been delved into more. It wasn't until I finished it that I saw that others had a similar problem where they didn't realise that this was a second book. I don't think I can accurately review this book as I don't know if certain things/relationships were initially developed in the first one. Whilst I agree it still worked as a singular work, I might've enjoyed it a lot more if I had read the first book prior, but that was my fault.

But in regards to the actual contents. I really loved the relationships Winona had with Thomas and John, and it was beautiful seeing her grow into herself. The writing was impeccable and gorgeously lyrical. The story pulled on my heart-strings at times and was overall a beautiful story.

I loved Days Without End (2016). It's a masterpiece. A stunning, page turner of a book which also has an unusual and interesting on gender identity and sexuality during the 19th century. Needless to say I was wanted to read A Thousand Moons (2020), the sequel, as I was keen to reacquaint myself with John Cole, Thomas McNulty, Winona et al.

A Thousand Moons is very readable and engrossing but sadly not a patch on its predecessor. Thomas and John, former soldiers and a loving couple, have now settled down on Lige Magan's farm in West Tennessee. Their oddly assorted community also includes ex-slaves Rosalee Bouguereau, her brother Tennyson, and Thomas and John's adopted daughter, Winona, a Native American orphan. Winona narrates A Thousand Moons and this change of perspective is somewhat jarring.

A Thousand Moons is worth reading if you like the characters, and there's plenty to enjoy and appreciate, however it lacks the richness and invention of Days Without End, and so, ultimately, is a disappointment.

I have read quite a lot of Sebastian Barry's earlier works and have adored most, in particular A Long Way. For some reason I found this quite inaccessible, and had to lay it aside. My intention is to buy the prequel Days Without End and try to immerse myself in Barry's world that way. Some novels repay work, and I suspect A Thousand Moons is one of them, and I intend to return to it.
Thank you to the publishers and to Netgalley for a free ARC

Thanks so much to Faber for letting me read A Thousand Moons by Sebastian Barry. I loved the prequel to this book, Days Without End, which told the story of Thomas McNulty and John Cole during the 1850s and 1860s in America. It was incredibly immersive and written with such a unique and convincing voice, so I was obviously keen to read A Thousand Moons. This sequel is about Winona, the couple's adopted Native American daughter. The writing was as beautiful and interesting as ever, I loved returning to the perfectly-created world, and it reminded me how much I love stories of found family. You really feel like you could step into this world and it would exist, and the story is told in a way that makes it seem less like fiction and more like fact. My only complaint is that the plot almost didn't seem sturdy enough to hold up a whole novel, and if I didn't enjoy Sebastian Barry's storytelling so much, I'm sure I would have been disappointed - especially compared to the sprawling story in Days Without End.

This book is about a period in history I know nothing about and therefore certain elements of it were very enlightening. I hadn’t read any of Sebastian Barry’s pre ious work and perhaps if I had realised this was a sequel I might not have chosen it and that is certainly why I did feel I was missing too much back story to really enjoy this story.

*THIS IS A SECOND NOVEL IN A SERIES, ALTHOUGH THEY CAN BE READ INDEPENDENTLY*
*IT CONTAINS SPOILERS*

A Thousand Moons follows the great success of Days Without End. Sebastian Barry lets us find again some old characters and meet new ones.

Thomas McNulty and John Cole are back, but in A Thousand Moons it is Winona who takes the lead and tells us her story. Or even, she tries to tell herself a story, one she does not understand fully and have not words for, neither in English nor in Lakota.

The story begins when Winona is around eighteen. She doesn’t know for sure since her people, the Lakota people from Wyoming, have been killed during the time when Americans were systematically exterminating the Indians.
Winona lives in Paris, Tennessee, in a farm with Lige Magan, John Cole, Thomas McNulty, Rosalee and Tannyson Bouguereau. This is her family and Winona loves them even if some of them are the very reason why her real family no longer exists.
She is possibly falling in love with Jas Jonski, a young guy who seems to pay her great attention when she’s in town and soon begins a proper courtship making Winona’s family aware of his intentions. They become engaged, but one night a dark episode involving whiskey occurs and Winona will never be the same girl again.
The same episode ignites a series of events that will turn Winona into a woman, stronger and wiser, and will take her on a journey of revenge and discovery.

Barry’s writing is powerful, precise. We read exactly what we need to read, not a word is wasted and yet the reader finds plenty of information and details about the surroundings.
The narrator’s voice could not be any further from the writer’s own voice, but there’s Barry’s ability of making Winona’s voice believable, as you would expect a teenage Indian girl in 1870s Tennessee to be like.

One of the parts I appreciated the most is at the very beginning, where Winona introduces herself, as if it was a way to assert her presence and her identity, giving both her Lakota name – Ojinjintka, meaning rose – and the name she goes by for everyone else – Winona, meaning firstborn, even though she’s not a firstborn, but it’s easier to pronounce.
It’s her story, her point of you, and it’s important to know that, as Winona herself admits, she might not be reliable sometimes in her account of the events.
I also particularly liked Winona’s friendship with the layer Briscoe. He’s her employer but it soon becomes clear that she’s more than that to him, she’s his protégée, some sort of grandchild figure to him.

What I liked a bit less were Winona’s relationship with Peg and the trope used at the very end to reveal the actual course of the events.
Winona decides to get involved in an attack to a camp where some notorious criminals live but she gets shot (not fatally) and she befriends the person who shot her, another Indian girl called Peg. Eventually they become lovers or there’s at least a romantic bound between them. What I didn’t like is that their relationship feels added just to create a counterpart to the gay relationship between Thomas and John, for no other reason than just for the sake of it. It could have had potential, especially compared to the toxic relationship with Jas Jonski, but I don’t think Barry succeeded in this. Simply a genuine female friendship between Winona and Peg would have been more effective.
After Jas Jonski is found dead in his room, the new Sheriff Frank Parkman decides to frame Winona and she gets arrested and sentenced to be hung for it. At the end of a very quick trial, Winona and Parkman are back in her cell and he can’t resist the need to boast about his clever plan to frame her. Wynkle King, Parkman’s friend and subordinate, happens to eavesdrop the conversation and decides to confront Parkman on the basis that it’s not right to sentence an innocent person. That’s the trope I was talking about, eavesdropping; I would have preferred another solution for the big revelation, and Wynkle King was never described as a particularly righteous character.
Also, the lawyer Briscoe is defending Winona in the trial, where all is based on the statement of two eyewitnesses that confirmed they recognised Winona in the girl who stopped them and asked them about Mr Hicks’s place (where Jas Jonski lived) – well, Winona knew that, why would she need to stop and ask them for directions? That would have easily dismantled the prosecution but it was never mentioned.

Overall, I found A Thousand Moons very enjoyable and difficult to put down. It wasn’t made clear since the beginning that this was a sequel, or a second episode, but despite having not read the first book, I found the story easy to follow as it gives enough coordinates for the reader to orientate in the story and among the different characters.

I requested ‘A Thousand Moons’ on NetGalley. I didn’t know Sebastian Barry, but the blurb did say ‘from the Costa Book of the Year-winning author of Days Without End’. Sadly it didn’t say ‘A Thousand Moons’ is a sequel to ‘Days without End’.

I

couldn’t get into the story from the start, and that might have something to do with knowing there is a book before this one. I kept thinking about what I was missing.



The story is written like some sort of remembrance. The writing is beautiful at times. I like prose, and Sebastian Barry’s prose is almost lyrical. I loved the way he wrote about the love between Thomas and John:

‘ He had this way of jutting out his face when he talked about John Cole, and his chin would go up and down, like a latch on a machine. John Cole was always in Thomas Mc Nulty’s good books.’

And the way Winona talks about queer men and vulnerability:

‘I don’t know if you ever saw a man take another man in his arms, but if you haven’t, I can tell you it is a touching sight. Because men are fixed to be so cold and brave, in their eyes.



On the other hand, I found the writing distant. The remembrance, Winona calling almost all the people in the story by their full names, and the storytelling instead of active dialogues. Especially the first half of the book lacks dialogues.

I

wanted to like this story so much, where someone like Winona is less than nothing. I highlighted sentences, but that’s not enough for me to give a high rating. Maybe I would have liked this story more (or even loved it) if I had read the first book, but as I said, I didn’t. Therefore I stay in the middle and rate this book three stars. Because I’m curious about the story between Thomas and John I’ll put ‘Days without end’ on my to read list.

“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.