Civil War Fiction

In the days immediately following the Civil War, Yankee soldiers called bummers straggled home, emotionally ravaged, exhausted, and hungry. Forced to steal what they needed along the way from weary families themselves devastated by war, they often left a wake of cruelty and violence. One such bummer impulsively grabs an 18-year-old Tennessee girl who is home alone with her young brother while their parents are gone to replenish needed supplies after the years of deprivation and hardship. The bummer stubbornly holds her for three days as they make their way north.

One of the great war novels, The Red Badge of Courage describes the first experience of front-line combat through the eyes of a young recruit, Henry Fleming, in one of the battles of the American Civil War. Under the stress of battle, Fleming is forced to face strong, conflicting emotions, ranging from bravado to terror as the conflict ebbs and flows.

As a teenage girl, Ginny marries Linus Lancaster, her mother's second cousin, and moves to his Kentucky pig farm "ninety miles from nowhere." In the shadows of the lush Kentucky landscape, Ginny discovers the empty promises of Linus' "paradise" - a place where the charms of her husband fall away to reveal a troubled man and cruel slave owner. Ginny befriends the young slaves Cleome and Zinnia who work at the farm - until Linus' attentions turn to them, and she finds herself torn between her husband and only companions.

The year is 1861, the eve of Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration. For Kate Warn, the first female private detective in American history, the only assignment tougher than exposing a conspiracy to assassinate the new president is training her new mentee, Hattie MacLaughlin, in the art of detection. The two women’s mission to save the president takes them from the granges of rural Maryland to the heart of secessionist high society, and sets them on a collision course that could alter the course of history.

For two days in the year 1862, the bloodiest battle of the American Civil War held theatre in Southern Tennessee - a patch of land called Shiloh. Thousands of soldiers on both sides of the conflict lost their lives, and tens of thousands more were badly injured. For twin brothers Henry and William, infantry soldiers in the Confederate Army, the battle held more than the horrors of war. It was a portal to something beyond mankind, where demons tread and angels fly, where the spilling of blood brings not only death, but eternal damnation.

Set in New Orleans in the years after the Civil War, A Separate Country is based on the incredible life of John Bell Hood, arguably one of the most controversial generals of the Confederate Army--and one of its most tragic figures. Robert E. Lee promoted him to major general after the Battle of Antietam. But the Civil War would mark him forever.

In these stories, characters struggle with allegiances both political and personal, their attempts at independence coinciding with the region’s growing nationalist fervor. Exquisitely attuned to the nuances of familial and cultural history, and beautifully blending pastoral and historical sensibilities, Electrodomésticos is a stunning debut about place, language, and identity, from a promising new voice.

Even the coming of an autumn dusk could not subdue the color of this land. Shadows here were not gray or black; they were violet and purple. The crumbling adobe walls were laced by strings of crimson peppers, vivid in the torch and lantern light. It had been this way for days, red and yellow, violet—colors many had hardly been aware existed back in the cool green, silver, gray-brown of Kentucky. So this was Tubacca! Back in ‘59 this had been a flourishing town, well on its way to prominence in the Southwest.

The Treason of Mary Louvestre is based on the true story of a seamstress slave from the Confederate town of Norfolk, Virginia. When her owner gets involved with modifications to the ironclad CSS Virginia, Mary copies the plans and sets out to commit treason against the South. Facing certain death as a spy if caught, she treks 200 miles during the bitter winter of 1862 to reach the office of Union Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, where she hands over the plans.

The gold is not making it to the governments of the USA and the CSA. Why? Ambitious politicians point fingers with one hand while stealing from the till with the other. There is violence in the streets and folks are unsure and upset. Can a few good men sort this out? And can anyone tell the good guys from the bad guys? Pinkerton agent Rob Finn and his sidekick Lonnie Walters return to Bannack to get the gold supply flowing to the Union again.

Trapped in what appears to be an endless bloodbath - vividly presented with Heffernan's meticulous historical research - three boys gradually begin to change until their close-knit childhood ties are little more than a fractured memory. By war's end, one boy is dead, one returns a physically crippled and emotionally compromised man, and the third comes home as an unfeeling psychopath. The novel turns on the subsequent murder of the psychopath, and the offer of redemption for the wounded young man.

Johnny Madigan is orphaned, penniless, and just 16 years old. He tells a Union Army recruiting sergeant he is 18 and old enough to fight. But is he - or indeed any man - ready to be thrown into the horrors of the American Civil War? On the bloody field of the Battle of Fredericksburg, as thousands of young men in both blue and grey are brutally cut down, the boy becomes a man. And he is thrown into a man's battle.

Colorful, dramatic, blundering, and tragic - these are some of the adjectives that have been applied to the two-day engagement at Shiloh. This battle, which bears the biblical name meaning “place of peace,” was one of the bloodiest encounters of the Civil War. The Union colonel, whose words give the present book its title, foretold the losses when he told his men: “Fill your canteens Boys! Some of you will be in hell before night….” Fought in the early spring of 1862 on the west bank of the Mississippi state line, Shiloh was, up to that time, the biggest battle of American history.

Junior Thompson, son of a freed slave, and Webbie Henderson, son of a wealthy family, cross a forbidden boundary between their properties and forge an unlikely friendship in the years that culminate in the Civil War. Young as they are, both must become the men of their families when their fathers are called to battle. When the war comes to their hometown of Carlisle and nearby Gettysburg, will they survive?

From best-selling author Dennis McFarland comes an extraordinary Civil War novel: the journey of a nineteen-year-old private abandoned by his comrades in the Wilderness, struggling to regain his voice, his identity, and his place in a world - all utterly changed by what he has experienced on the battlefield. In the winter of 1864, young Summerfield Hayes, a pitcher for the famous Eckford Club, enlists in the Union army, leaving his sister, a schoolteacher, devastated and alone in their Brooklyn home.

At the close of the Civil War, weary veteran Malcolm Hopeton returns to his home in Western New York State to find his wife and hired man missing and his farm in disrepair. A double murder ensues, the repercussions of which ripple through a community with spiritual roots in the Second Great Awakening. Hopeton has gone from the horrors of war to those far worse, and arrayed around him are a host of other people struggling to make sense of his crime.

George Ward Nichols was born in Tremont, Maine, on 21st June, 1831. He worked as a journalist until the outbreak of the American Civil War and then joined the Union Army. He served under General William Sherman and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel. He published The Story of the Great March, essentially a journal he kept during that march in 1865 and it became an immediate best seller.

While attempting to join up with her lover Matt Jorgensen as he joins Confederate Calvary, Ginny McBride is hit by a musketball from a Union rifle. She develops amnesia, losing all memory as to who and where she is. Matt spends his military time trying to find her. When she returns to herself, she in turn tries to find Matt. It is a story that also engulfs the Western folklore of Jesse James, Cole Younger and his brothers and Belle (Starr) Shirley as they became legends.

Noted historian Robert Hendrickson has written more than 40 books and has earned critical acclaim for his meticulous historical research and highly accessible style. In The Road to Appomattox, by weaving together passages from diaries, military reports, and newspapers, Hendrickson creates a vivid, firsthand account of the final year of the Civil War.

Dawoud is on the run from his murky past, aiming to discover where he belongs. He tries to assimilate into different groups along his journey through North Africa and Israel, changing his clothes, his religious affiliations, and even his name to fit in, but the safety and peace he seeks remain elusive. It seems prejudice is everywhere, holding him back, when all he really wants is to create a simple life he can call his own. A chameleon, Dawoud—or David, Adal, or Dawit, depending on where and when you meet him—is not lost in this whirl of identities. In fact, he is defined by it.