American Civil War Fiction

Ambrose Bierce brings to life the heart rendering stories of divided loyalties, splitting families, states, countries, and individuals. He writes of the glory in beginning and savagery in the doing. Here is a moving anti-war series of stories if ever there was one. A must read by all students of American History and Literature, though perhaps best understood by older adults.

Everyone has heard of the bloody conflict that cost the lives of over one million people. When people think of the Civil War, they think of Abraham Lincoln, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the North-South divide between the American states, but there is so much more to uncover about the American Civil War.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER The second prequel, following Dead Man’s Walk, to Larry McMurtry’s classic novel Lonesome Dove charts the harrowing careers of Texas Rangers Augustus McCrae and Woodrow F. Call as they fight foes throughout the Texas territory and their own demons, setting up the events...

The incidents of the book are real ones, drawn in part from the writer's personal experiences and observations as a soldier of the Union during that war. He is also indebted to many comrades for reminiscences of battle and prison life. The perilous escape of Jed and Dick, from Andersonville down the Flint and Apalachicola Rivers, to the Gulf of Mexico, is in substance the narrative of a comrade whom the writer knew at Andersonville, and afterwards met when the war had closed. The descriptions of the prison are especially truthful, for in them the author briefly tells what he saw.

As the United States marks the 150th anniversary of our defining national drama, 1861 presents a gripping and original account of how the Civil War began. 1861 is an epic of courage and heroism beyond the battlefields. Early in that fateful year, a second American revolution unfolded, inspiring a new generation to reject their parents' faith in compromise and appeasement, to do the unthinkable in the name of an ideal.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Continuing the series that began with A Blaze of Glory, Jeff Shaara returns to chronicle another decisive chapter in America’s long and bloody Civil War. In A Chain of Thunder, the action shifts to the fortress city of Vicksburg, Mississippi. There, in the vaunted...

Among the autobiographies of great military figures, Ulysses S. Grant’s is certainly one of the finest, and it is arguably the most notable literary achievement of any American president: a lucid, compelling, and brutally honest chronicle of triumph and failure. From his frontier boyhood, to his heroics in battle, to the grinding poverty from which the Civil War ironically rescued him, these memoirs are a mesmerizing, deeply moving account of a brilliant man told with great courage.

"Within the harrowing landscape of both the Spanish Civil War and World War II, Escobar shines a light on hope and humanity. Descriptions and prose, both startling and lyrical, bring you into the scene and into the lives of both Elisabeth and Isabel as they strive to survive, thrive, and care...

Harriet Ann Jacob's autobiography documents her life as a slave and how she attained freedom for herself and her children. Harrowing in its descriptions of sexual abuse, Jacob's slave narrative is notable for the appeal it made to abolitionist women to open their eyes to the realities of slavery. Deemed too shocking for reading audiences at the time, the book was shelved before it was published in 1861 near the start of the Civil War.

Susie King Taylor, born a slave in 1848, would learn to read at secret schools and go on to teach countless others to read and write. Follow the course of the Civil War in her own words as she remembers her work as a nurse and teacher with an Army troop of African-American soldiers.

East Texas wasn’t much of a home for Cullen Baker. Few liked him, and some even tried to kill him. Yet after three hard years of wandering, he’s come back to farm the land that’s rightfully his. Only Cullen’s in for an unwelcome homecoming: his neighbors have long memories, the...

From the author of The Ground Breaking, longlisted for the National Book Award, comes a riveting saga of the last year of the Civil War—and a revealing new account of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln Told with a page-turning pace, New York Times bestselling author and historian Scott...

Dal and Mac Traven left Texas young and idealistic. They came back from opposite sides of a living hell, a war that had torn the nation in two. They wanted only to reclaim their old lives—but one man held their futures hostage. Colonel Henry T. Ashford had gathered an army of criminals and...

Jack Kerouac’s classic novel about friendship, the search for meaning, and the allure of nature “In [On the Road] Kerouac’s heroes were sensation seekers; now they are seekers after truth . . . the novel often attains a beautiful dignity.”—Chicago Tribune First published in 1958, a...

New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice A courageous young Sri Lankan woman tries to protect her dream of becoming a doctor in this “heartbreaking exploration of a family fractured by civil war” (Brit Bennett, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Vanishing Half). “This book...

He was etched by the desert’s howling winds, a big, broad-shouldered man who knew the ways of the Apache and the ways of staying alive. She was a woman alone raising a young son on a remote Arizona ranch. And between Hondo Lane and Angie Lowe was the warrior Vittoro, whose people were...

Three decades...Five Riftwars...One magnificent saga: Magician's End is the final book in New York Times bestselling author Raymond E. Feist's science fiction epic Riftwar Cycle. Thirty years ago, Feist's first novel, Magician, introduced us to an orphan boy named Pug, who rises from slavery to...

America, 1861. Battle lines have been drawn between the North and the South, pitting state against state - and brother against brother. For the three young sons of Ohio State Senator Clay Bell, the Civil War would change not only their lives, but the destinies of future generations. Jacob Bell, the eldest, defies his father's wishes to run the family law practice and enlists in Ohio's Volunteer Calvary, a decision that wins him the love of an officer's daughter - and the hatred of a dangerous childhood rival.

Crispin Mayo was a reckless young brawler who’d left his tiny fishing village for the vast American frontier. Headed west to join a railroad construction crew, he came upon an isolated station—and a mystery. The shack was abandoned, but fresh blood spattered the floor, and the telegraph...

In this illuminating biographical novel, Sherry Jones spans Josephine Baker's early years in servitude and poverty in America to her rise to fame as a showgirl in her famous banana skirt to her activism against discrimination, and her many loves and losses. From 1920s Paris to 1960s Washington to her final, triumphant performance, one of the most extraordinary lives of the 20th century comes to stunning life on the page. With intimate prose and comprehensive research, Sherry Jones brings Josephine Baker into focus for the first time in a joyous celebration of a life lived in technicolor.