Books

Faber to publish Sebastian Barry’s sequel to Costa winner Days Without End next March

A Thousand Moons is told through the voice of Winona, a young Lakota orphan

“Nobody writes like, nobody takes lyrical risks like, nobody pushes the language, and the heart, and the two together, quite like Sebastian Barry does,” said Ali Smith. Photograph: Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images

Thu Aug 29 2019 - 10:25

Faber & Faber is to publish the sequel to Sebastian Barry’s Costa 2016 Book of the Year Days Without End next year, it announced today. A Thousand Moons is scheduled to be published on March 19th.

Editorial director Angus Cargill, 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.”

Winona is a young Lakota orphan adopted by former soldiers Thomas McNulty and John Cole. Living 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 US civil war, is soon threatened by a further traumatic event, one which Winona struggles to confront, let alone understand.

Told in Barry’s lyrical prose, A Thousand Moons is, the publisher says, “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”.

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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 10 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 Co 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,” said Ali Smith, “so that you come out of whatever he writes like you’ve been away, in another climate.”