How vulnerable is a child in war. How much more vulnerable if that child is poor, motherless and Indigenous?

The narrator of A Thousand Moons is Winona Cole, a young Lakota woman. Her story picks up where Irishman Sebastian Barry's prequel, the roiling, violent Days Without End left off.

Days Without End closed in West Tennessee, after an extraordinary gallop across the heartland of America and the Civil War. After the war, ex-Union soldiers and beaus, Thomas McNulty and John Cole, bring Winona to the small tobacco farm owned by their former comrade in arms Lige Magan.

Their household, which consists of three Union bluecoats, an Indian girl and two freed slaves, is a provocation to seething Henry County, with its cotton fields and Confederate jackets.

For Winona, the very people she cherishes in this household - John and Thomas - are also a provocation. In their soldiering days, they were engaged for years in the wholesale slaughter of Winona's people and of the Chickasaw, the Cherokee and others. They may even have killed some of Winona's family.

Winona is not even Winona. Her birth name is Ojinjintka, meaning rose. But Thomas cannot pronounce it. He dubs her Winona, meaning first born, though she is no such thing. Her elder sister, along with her mother, cousins and aunts were all killed by the likes of Thomas and John. "I had the wound of being a lost child. Thing was it was they that healed me, Thomas McNulty and John Cole... So they both gave me the wound and healed it, which is a hard fact in its way."

This is a hard fact for an Australian reader too. Could an Irishman write a story about an Aboriginal girl, bought up by two troopers who were lovers? It is to Barry's credit that he pulls it off. His language, his lyricism, the rhythm and patois of the first person narration rarely skips a beat.

Winona knows that to most whitefolk, she is nothing more than a cinder from the great conflagration in which the Indian nations were decimated: "Folks didn't like to see an ember drifting back". She is living in a county dotted with outlawed night riders, capricious sheriffs, militiamen, "defeated rebs" and the freed slaves who are salt to the wounds of the routed south. It is a wild place full of wild men and their guns. Through this "ruined country" steps a Lakota girl with the narratorial voice of an angel.

Then Jas Jonski, an unbecoming dry-goods clerk, declares his love for Winona. This is even more perilous for her. Courtship, the admiration of a white suitor, or marriage is simply not possible for someone who is seen as more wolf than woman.

And yet Winona survives a terrible calamity brought about by this short-lived courtship. Like her warrior mother, she shows great tenacity and determination. Against all the odds, the love of Thomas McNulty and John Cole also survives, as does Winona's blossoming love for the young Chickasaw girl Peg. Former slave Tennyson, who works on the farm, is beaten so savagely by a mob that he becomes mute. But he too survives and is sent to college in Nashville.

There is so much to love about Winona and her cherished world of survivors on Lige Magan's tobacco farm.

If there's a somewhat oblique criticism of the work, it is this - the violence in Days Without End is told by one of its foot soldiers, Thomas McNulty. It is a shocking and strangely clarifying work in that it never shies from recounting the utter brutality meted out to Native Americans in the 19th century. Here, however, the narrator is a young Lakota woman. Winona's voice is pure and pitch-perfect in itself. But I couldn't help wondering if she sometimes wore her troubles a little too lightly. Would a woman or a Native American woman have told such a tempered story? No doubt she would not have.

In an interview, Sebastian Barry said the poet Seamus Heaney once almost warned him off his renowned lyricism. In this work, the poetry of Winona's voice occasionally lacks the timbre of one who has witnessed calamitous violence, had great violence done to her, to her race and her family. Beaten senseless for daring to be "uppity", Tennyson chooses not to speak. But the message from him is loud and clear. Sometimes a hurt cannot be lessened with words, even the most lyrical of words.

While A Thousand Moons lacked some of the tempo of its prequel, I was glad to be back in the company of Winona Cole, John Cole and Thomas McNulty. This is a fine read, with its small band of brave outcasts who grapple daily with "the consequences of war, otherwise known as peace".