PositiveThe Irish Times (IRE)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 ... The protagonist and speaker of his newest novel...might be one of the most lost, the most eroded into the dust of history, a decision that will raise pressing questions about the politics of representation, though Barry treats his subject with sensitivity and nuance ... Winona’s act of writing, of claiming a narrative, is one of the ways she wrests control over her circumstances, a theme that runs through Barry’s work. A Thousand Moons is a novel about weaving a voice, story, and self out of the shards of a language that is both inadequate to and elastic enough to meet the enormity of living.
