by Laird Hunt
First published 2015
During the American Civil War, a young woman cuts her hair and binds her chest to take her husband's place in the Union Army. Her husband is too frail for battle, so she leaves their farm and marches off to war in his stead. As she moves through training camps and battlefields, she witnesses the transformation of ordinary men into monsters. The war strips away her assumptions about good and evil, revealing instead a world where cruelty and kindness exist side by side. She encounters nightmare visions and surreal moments that blur the line between reality and madness. Her disguise becomes more than clothing and manmannerisms. It becomes a shifting identity that changes with each battle, each death, each act of violence she commits or witnesses. The war pulls her deeper into moral ambiguity, forcing her to question everything she once believed about herself and the world. Hunt explores how conflict destroys certainty and reveals the fragile nature of human understanding.
Genres: american-civil-war, american-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, 19th-century
Vibes: dark, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Union Army, America
Period: American Civil War
260 pages · Paperback · Actes Sud
Content warnings: violence, war