A THOUSAND MOONS

SEBASTIAN BARRY Faber, 251pp, £18.99

Barry’s novel takes up the story of his award-winning Days Without End, and, according to Ian Critchley in the Literary Review, ‘shares some of its faults’. Nevertheless he found it ‘a compelling portrait of life in 19thcentury America’, with its central character, Winona, a ‘wonderful creation’. Winona is the Native American adopted daughter of Thomas Mcnulty and his fellow Civil War soldier and lover John Cole, the heroes of the first book. This sequel takes up the story when Winona is 17.

Erica Wagner in the FT described her and her two fathers as ‘a new kind of family forged in a new kind of nation’: the violence of the past behind them, they live in Paris, Tennessee in a ‘world of homesteads and pickled pears and peace’. Then Winona and one of their farmworkers are brutally attacked and she sets out on a journey of revenge in boys’ britches and a gun and knife in her belt. Her subsequent adventures, wrote Alex Preston in the Guardian, take her ‘on a journey that is horrifying, thrilling and enchanting in equal measure’. Usefully, he also told us that although it’s a sequel, the novel stands alone, ‘wasting no time with backstory as it launches into its typically rollicking tale’. Wagner concluded that this is a ‘less satisfying novel than its predecessor’ albeit ‘subtle, troubling and full of silences and pain’. ‘Barry,’ she wrote, ‘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.’