2020: The Year Ahead in Books, by Allan Massie

Sebastian Barry’s last novel, Days Without End, won several prizes , chief among them the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction. A Thousand Moons, to be published in March by Faber & Faber, is a sequel, but this time the story is told by Winona, the Lakota orphan adopted by Thomas McNulty and John Cole, and brought up in, what was for the times, an unorthodox household on a farm in Tennessee. There can be few novelists today who write as well as Barry.