Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. He is the first novelist to twice win the Costa Book of the Year award, for Days Without End and The Secret Scripture, and has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The current Laureate for Irish Fiction, he lives in County Wicklow, Ireland.
Praise for A Thousand Moons:
“[His characters] may have rolled under the floorboards of history,
but in Barry’s capacious, generous imagination, they have a
speaking voice. Their lives, often of abysmal failure, anguish, and
bare survival, become as heroic as in any classical
epic.” —Hermione Lee, The New York Review of Books
“[F]reighted with history and meaning. War’s aftershocks, Native
American genocide, African-American slavery, not to mention gender
fluidity: all of this Mr. Barry folds into Winona’s narrative with
his customary skill . . . Winona is our clear-eyed guide not only
to the annihilated past but also to the enduring natural world.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“An astonishing first-person performance of a different sort—a
high-wire virtuoso mix of Irish and frontier vernacular. Love and
war, gender fluidity, an outsider’s piercing take on the
foundations of modern America. Near-surreal violence, with moments
of great tenderness.” —Kazuo Ishiguro
“Barry prefers moral complication to the righteous simplicities of
‘us’ and ‘them’ . . . the writing brings off Barry’s characteristic
balancing act, between the lyrical telling that comes to him
naturally and the grubby, tormenting world he wants to show us . .
. The politics and power struggles, male brutality and race
rhetoric in this novel are imagined with an intuitive, unsparing
realism . . . Because of something unguarded in his writing, and
his idiom borrowed from ordinary speech and proverbial wisdom, we
can trust him to touch the terrible stories from our collective
past without betraying them, or turning them merely into clever
art. His work reminds us how much we need these rare gifts of the
natural storyteller, for reckoning with our past and present.” —The
Guardian (London)
“Barry’s atmospheric prose captures the mid-nineteenth century’s
language and hardscrabble spirit.” —The New Yorker
“Along with memorable characters and a powerful story line, A
Thousand Moons blends bygone language with rich imagery . . . like
its predecessor, this novel considers timeless ideas like tolerance
and human rights. Taken together, these books stand as a sustained
interrogation of this country’s founding ideas and myths . . .
Barry’s affection and respect for Winona is palpable. A Thousand
Moons is a sincere and well-written novel starring an intrepid,
self-sufficient heroine. We can never have too many of these.”
—Star-Tribune
“Barry at his powerful, lyrical best . . . Identity, culture,
gender and race are examined sensitively through the eyes of
Winona, a Native American girl adopted by the cross-dressing Thomas
McNulty and his partner John Cole during the American Indian Wars.”
—The Independent, “Best Books of 2020”
“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.” —The
Irish Times
“Sebastian Barry’s way with language is a constant wonder
and A Thousand Moons is another golden thread in his
unfolding annal of history’s anomalous people.” —Fintan
O'Toole, New Statesman
“Barry understands full well the challenges inherent in his
decision to tell Winona’s story. This is a subtle, troubling novel,
full of silences, full of pain . . . Barry knows that it is too
much to look for redemption in a story like Winona’s, but in his
telling he shows that love offers at least a spark of hope.”
—Financial Times
“A compelling tale of identity and revenge . . . a journey that is
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 . . . [P]rose 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.” —The
Observer (London)
“A poetic sensibility runs through this luminous novel of sorrow
and uplift by the Booker-nominated, multi-award-winning Barry.
Highly recommended.” —Library Journal (starred review)
“[T]his beautifully rendered historical bildungsroman is equal
parts thrilling and meditative.” —Booklist
“In Winona, who sees both the beauty and the piercing loss of her
world, Barry has created a vivid if didactic heroine . . . [W]ill
satisfy fans of the first installment [Days Without End].”
—Publishers Weekly
“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.” —The Times (London)
“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.” —The Sunday
Times (London)
“Barry is an extraordinary descriptive writer. The prose is tightly
wound and seems so persistently on the edge of violence that acts
of compassion are almost as shocking as those of brutality . . .
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.'” —Sunday Telegraph (London)
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