The Good Lord Bird by James McBride followed an escaped slave in the years leading up to the war. Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End told of a gay couple fighting in first the Indian wars, then the civil war. Only recently have novelists sought to uncover stories that step outside this dominant narrative mode. The subgenre of historical fiction about the American civil war is generally a slightly macho, fusty one, with accuracy privileged over narrative, drawn-out battle scenes over emotional complexity, and a focus on the lives of red-blooded, white-skinned men (and the women who love them) drowning out the experience of others.
'Outstanding.T he civil war has a central place in American literary history, featuring in novels that achieved global success – think Cold Mountain and Gone With the Wind – and others that were hits in their native land but didn’t translate (Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels, EL Doctorow’s The March and The Black Flower by Howard Bahr, to name just a few). a gripping and compelling novel that exposes flaws, mixed emotions and imperfect relationships, and yet it holds on with determination and hope. 'A staggering debut and a story that stays with you' The comparisons with Colson Whitehead are justified' 'Such a powerful, magnificent book I urge you to read it.
Readers have been swept away by The Sweetness of Water: ' highly accomplished debut' Sunday Times But this sanctuary survives on a knife's edge, and it isn't long before the inhabitants of the nearby town of Old Ox react with fury at the alliances being formed only a few miles away. When the brothers begin to live and work on George's farm, the tentative bonds of trust and union begin to blossom between the strangers.
Forced to hide out in the woods near their former Georgia plantation, they're soon discovered by the land's owner, George Walker, a man still reeling from the loss of his son in the war. In the dying days of the American Civil War, newly freed brothers Landry and Prentiss find themselves cast into the world without a penny to their names.
'A fine, lyrical novel, impressive in its complex interweaving of the grand and the intimate, of the personal and political' ObserverĪn extraordinary novel of life after slavery for readers of WASHINGTON BLACK, THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD and DAYS WITHOUT END.
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