Superb Civil War Fiction
Discover superb Civil War fiction with our curated list of the best books. Immerse yourself in gripping historical novels that bring the era to life with vivid storytelling.
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Rebels of Babylon
by Owen Parry
Civil War detective Abel Jones investigates murder and theft in New Orleans in this dark and rich sixth installment in the Hammett and Herodotus award-winning series.
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Paradise Alley
by Kevin Baker
At the height of the Civil War, what begins with strong words and a few broken bottles will, over the course of five days, escalate into the worst urban conflagration in American history. Hundreds of thousands of poor Irish immigrants smolder with resentment against a war and a president that have cost them so many of their young men. When word spreads throughout New York's immigrant wards that a military draft is about to be implemented -- a draft from which any rich man's son with $300 can buy an exemption -- trouble begins to spill into the streets. Down in the waterfront slum of Paradise Alley, three women -- Deirdre Dolan O'Kane, Ruth Dove, and Maddy Boyle -- struggle with their private fears as they wait for the storm to descend on them. Deirdre, whose lace-curtain sensibilities have always kept her at arm's length from her neighbors, is devastated by the discovery that her husband, Tom, has been wounded at Gettysburg. In her desperation, Deirdre must turn for aid and comfort to Ruth, a woman she has always judged as morally depraved. Ruth, too, has been cut off from her husband, Billy Dove, an ex-slave. At dawn he set out for the Colored Orphans' Asylum uptown, to collect his last wages. But he has not returned by day's end, or by the next morning. In the meantime, Ruth has learned that dozens of black men and women have been lynched or beaten by rioters. She begins to fear the worst, not just for Billy, but for herself and their children, too -- because she now knows that he is coming. He is Dangerous Johnny Dolan, Deirdre's estranged brother, who after fourteen years' exile has returned to New York. Years before, it was Johnny who saved Ruth from the famine in Ireland, who arranged for her steerage passage from Dublin to New York -- and who beat her mercilessly until she arranged to have him sent away for murder. Even as the riot builds toward its violent climax, Dolan searches relentlessly for Ruth and Deirdre, carried along by the unruly mob. In the end, these remarkable women have nothing but one another to rely on as they seek to protect their homes and families from the brutality of a city -- and a nation -- gone mad. Paradise Alley a story of race and hatred, of love and war, of risk and dauntless courage.
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Gob's Grief
by Chris Adrian
The literary debut of an electrifying talent that gives the historical novel an exhilarating dose of originality, style, and visionary energy. Gob's Grief recounts the lives of Gob and Tomo Woodhull, fictional twin sons of the real Victoria Woodhull, the nineteenth-century proto-feminist. In August of 1863, Tomo, who is eleven years old, runs off to the Civil War and dies in his first battle. Gob grows up in a profound state of grief, and by the time that he's an adult studying to be a doctor in New York City, he has begun to make real a dream to build a machine that might bring Tomo--indeed, all the war dead--back to life. As Gob's obsessions deepen, we are taken from the battlefields at Chickamauga Creek to the society balls of New York, from innocent childhoods in Homer, Ohio, to the building of the Brooklyn Bridge; and as the machine grows, so does the amazing cast of real and imagined characters: Walt Whitman, ministering lovingly to the Civil War wounded; Mrs. Woodhull and her sister Tennessee, doing business on Wall Street and riding churning tides of scandal; Gob's friend Will Fie, a war veteran who builds a house from glass images of suffering and death; Maci Trufant, Victoria Woodhull's protege and Gob's great love; and even unnatural Pickie Beecher, a child who seems to float sinisterly between the living and the dead. These disparate lives come together in support of Gob's endeavor, but the abolition of death and the success of his machine may come at a price more hideous and awful than any of them can know. Both convincing in its portrayal of the collective madness America went through after the carnage of the Civil War, and otherworldly in its contemplation ofobsessive grief and longing, Gob's Grief is at once an announcement of a major talent, and an extraordinary achievement in literary art.
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A Prayer for the Dying
by Stewart O'Nan
Set in Friendship, Wisconsin, just after the Civil War, A Prayer for the Dying tells of a horrible epidemic that has gripped the town in a vise of fear and death.Jacob Hansen, Friendship's sheriff, undertaker, and pastor, is soon overwhelmed, though he continues to do what he can.But Jacob cannot control the plague's rapid spread, the panic that takes over Friendship, or his own feelings of despair.Dark, poetic, and chilling, A Prayer for the Dying makes us consider if it's possible to be a good man in a time of madness.AUTHORBIO: Stewart O'Nan's first collection of stories, In the Walled City, won the Drue Heinz Literary Prize.He is the author of four previous novels, Snow Angels, The Names of the Dead, The Speed Queen, and A World Away.He lives in Connecticut.
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The Year of Jubilo
by Howard Bahr
From the author of the award-winning novel The Black Flower comes a novel about a Confederate soldier returning home to find that life-and love-will never be the same. On a balmy spring day in 1865 Gawain Harper trudges toward his home in Cumberland, Mississippi, where three years earlier he had boarded a train carrying the latest enlistees in the Mississippi Infantry. Unmoved by the cause that motivated so many others, he had joined up only when Morgan Rhea's father told Gawain that he would never wed his beloved Morgan unless he did his part in the war effort. Now, upon his arrival, he discovers post-war life is far from what he expected. Morgan has indeed waited for him, but before they can marry there are scores to be settled. For in his hometown yet another battle is being waged, and the enemy is not the occupying Federal troops, but Cumberland's own King Solomon Gault, a deranged, manipulative man on a mission to restore his own brand of justice to a community turned upside down. As Gawain struggles to find a way to avenge the Rhea family's honor, he is drawn into an inexorable showdown with Gault that once again pits South against North, and dignity against defeat. Written with scrupulous respect for historical accuracy, The Year of Jubilo brilliantly evokes a time of sorrow and defeat, of anarchy and violence, and also of hope and rebuilding. A poignant and sweeping novel that reveals the human side of one of the most trying and pivotal moments in American history, it is sure to catapult Howard Bahr to the top rank of American novelists.
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Suspension
by Richard E. Crabbe
"First novelist Crabbe is a thoughtful writer....His suspenseful, wel-researched historical will have Caleb Carr fans asking for more.Comparisons to The Alienist are well-earned."(Library Journal)
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The Other Side
by Kevin McColley
Jacob Wilson is ambivalent about the Civil War that rages around him, until the local militia discover the runaway slaves hiding on his Ohio farm and retaliate by abusing his mother and destroying his home.
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In the Fall
by Jeffrey Lent
An interracial relationship at the end of the Civil War between a Union soldier and a runaway slave initiates a haunting family legacy of war, racism, and secrets that follows three generations from the end of the Civil War to the Great Depression. A first novel. 100,000 first printing. $200,000 ad/promo. BOMC Main. QPB.
