AThousand Moons

Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. The current Laureate for Irish Fiction, his novels have twice won the Costa Book of the Year award, the Independent Booksellers Award and the Walter Scott Prize. He had two consecutive novels shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, A Long Long Way (2005) and the top ten bestseller The Secret Scripture (2008), and has also won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize, the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He lives in County Wicklow.From the Costa Book of the Year-winning author of Days Without EndHis work reminds us how much we need these rare gifts of the natural storyteller, for reckoning with our past and present.Sebastian Barry writes about unconditional love better than anyone else I have ever read. Ever.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.Stunning . . . Brutal, believable and breathtakingly beautiful.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.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.Barry is the Laureate for Irish Fiction, but he is also the laureate of empathy... an extraordinary achievement.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".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.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.A richly poetic read. Barry is concerned again with shifting sexual, personal and political boundaries, with the effects of tumultuous times - of rivalry, lawlessness and fissure - on individuals, families and communities, and with interactions between those on opposite sides of a political debate.Barry is a master at creating a mesmerising voice that commands your undivided attention, and filling a landscape so skilfully it feels like a place you already know.Vivid, enthralling . A Thousand Moons is a tale graced with such a glow of love that even the most hopeless circumstances seem burnished with hope.Strange and beautiful ... spine-tingling.Unmissable . extraordinary.Old God's Time (March 2023), Sebastian Barry's stunning new novel, available to pre-order now

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