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.

Angus Cargill, Editorial Director, said:

A new novel from Sebastian Barry is a huge moment for Faber as a company, but to have A Thousand Moons as his follow-up to Days Without End is incredibly exciting. Told in the voice of Winona – this extraordinary character trying to live through the trauma of dispossession – it is a brave and beautiful novel, which will, once again, capture readers’ hearts.

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 IBW Book 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.

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