A Thousand Moons by Sebastian Barry

 

Winona Cole is a Lakota child, brought from the killing fields of the West to Tennessee where her adoptive fathers, John Cole and Thomas McNulty, have settled on the farm of one of their friends.  She is raised as any other girl would be, except that she is given an education and except that she is raised with the knowledge that her family was massacred and that in American society she is seen as less than human, a little better than an animal.

But that doesn't stop the men of the nearby town from desiring her.  A clerk in the general store courts her and soon declares her as his fiancée.  That doesn't sit well in the Tennessee a decade after the war.  Those who would have been rebels have gained the governor's mansion and most of the local offices and prejudice and night riding are back in style.  

When Winona comes home bloodied and raped from a trip into town, her fathers want to take off immediately and kill the man who did it.  Winona has a blackness in her mind and can't remember who it was or even exactly what happened.  But suspicion falls on her former fiancée and when he is killed the law comes for Winona.  Will she end up on the hangman's platform?

This is the second book in Sebastian Barry's Days Without End series.  Fans of the author, of whom I claim membership with, will recognize the McNulty name from his series about the Irish troubles.  Barry has been nominated for the Booker three times, the most recently this year, and is known as one of the premiere Irish writers of our time.  Readers will sympathize with Winona and recognize John and Thomas from the earlier book and from history of those times.  This book is recommended for readers of literary fiction.