A Thousand Moons: A Novel - Hardcover

Barry, Sebastian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0735223106 ISBN 13: 9780735223103

Publisher: Viking, 2020

Synopsis

A dazzling new novel about memory and identity set in Paris, Tennessee in the aftermath of the American civil war from the Booker Prize shortlisted author

Winona Cole, an orphaned child of the Lakota Indians, finds herself growing up in an unconventional household on a farm in West Tennessee. Raised by her adoptive father John Cole and his brother-in-arms Thomas McNulty, this odd little family scrapes a living on Lige Magan's farm with the help two freed slaves, the Bougereau siblings. They try to keep the brutal outside world at bay, along with their memories of the past. But Tennessee is a state still riven by the bitter legacy of the civil war and when first Winona and then Tennyson Bouguereau are violently attacked by forces unknown, Colonel Purton raises the Militia to quell the rebels and night-riders who are massing on the outskirts of town. Armed with a knife, Tennyson's borrowed gun and the courage of her famous warrior mother Winona decides to take matters into her own hands and embarks on a quest for justice which will uncover the dark secrets of her past and finally reveal to her who she really is. Exquisitely written and thrumming with the irrepressible spirit of a young girl on the brink of adulthood, A Thousand Moons is a glorious story of love and redemption.

About this title

About the Author:

Novelist, poet, and playwright Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. Sebastian is the author of the highly acclaimed novels The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, Annie Dunne, and A Long Long Way, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His novel The Secret Scripture was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and On Canaan's Side was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Award. Days Without End was longlisted for the Booker Prize.

Review:

Praise for Days Without End

"A true leftfield wonder: Days Without End is a violent, superbly lyrical western offering a sweeping vision of America in the making, the most fascinating line-by-line first person narration I've come across in years."—Kazuo Ishiguro, Booker Prize winning author of The Remains of the Day and The Buried Giant

“A haunting archeology of youth . . . Barry introduces a narrator who speaks with an intoxicating blend of wit and wide-eyed awe, his unsettlingly lovely prose unspooling with an immigrant’s peculiar lilt and a proud boy’s humor. But in this country’s adolescence he also finds our essential human paradox, our heartbreak: that love and fear are equally ineradicable."—Katy Simpson Smith, The New York Times Book Review
 
“Days Without End is suffused with joy and good spirit . . . Through Barry, the frontiersman has a poet’s sense of language . . . If you underlined every sentence in Days Without End that has a rustic beauty to it, you’d end up with a mighty stripy book.”—Sarah Begley, Time

“Mr. Barry’s frontier saga is a vertiginous pile-up of inhumanity and stolen love: gore-soaked and romantic, murderous and musical . . . The rough-hewn yet hypnotic voice that Mr. Barry has fashioned carries the novel from the staccato chaos of battle to wistful hymns to youth . . . an absorbing story that sets the horrors of history against the consolations of hearth and home.”—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

“Alternately brutal and folksy . . . Barry’s prose can take brilliant turns without sounding implausible coming out of Thomas’s mouth. A mordant vein of comedy runs through the book . . . the 'wilderness of furious death' his characters inhabit has a gut-punching credibility.”—Michael Upchurch, The Washington Post

“Barry’s magisterial tale of love, war and redemption is one of the year’s great novels . . . Visceral violence, wrenching emotion, astutely drawn characters and a compelling narrative voice make for memorable reading.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“McNulty is a lyrical and companionable narrator for this bloody part of America's history.”—NPR 

“Sebastian Barry had me in no uncertain terms from the first sentence and never let up. And he writes like there’s no tomorrow—like there are days without end. He navigates the terrain as a master of fictional conventions and sweeps us along in a big picaresque arc that is just the right vessel for his thematic necessities.” —David Guterson, author of Snow Falling on Cedars

“A tour de force of style and atmosphere . . . Evocative of Cormac McCarthy and Charles Portis, Days Without End is a timeless work of historical fiction.”—Booklist (Starred Review)

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking
• Publication date: 2020
• ISBN 10: 0735223106
• ISBN 13: 9780735223103
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256