Deze serie duikt in de tumultueuze landschappen van het 19e-eeuwse Amerika, en volgt twee jonge mannen door de Indianenoorlogen en de Burgeroorlog. Ondanks de gruwelen die ze meemaken en waaraan ze deelnemen, vinden ze momenten van verwondering en diepe verbinding. Het is een levendige verkenning van vriendschap, overleving en de voortdurende zoektocht naar ergens thuishoren tegen de achtergrond van een strijdende natie.
Entering the U.S. army after fleeing the Great Famine in Ireland, seventeen-year-old Thomas McNulty and his brother-in-arms, John Cole, experience the harrowing realities of the Indian wars and the American Civil War between the Wyoming plains and Tennessee.
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 rare and masterly 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.