First published 1989
Lucy Marsden sits in a North Carolina nursing home at age ninety-nine, ready to tell her story. At fifteen, she married Captain William Marsden, a Confederate veteran who carried the war's trauma into their household. Lucy raised their children while managing Will's violent outbursts and memories of battle. She witnessed his friendship with a former slave, heard his stories of Antietam and Gettysburg, and endured decades of a marriage shaped by America's bloodiest conflict. Through Lucy's voice, the Civil War becomes personal history rather than distant tragedy. Her tale spans from Reconstruction through the modern South, capturing how one war's aftermath rippled through generations. Lucy tells of love complicated by violence, of a region struggling to understand its past, and of a woman who survived by finding strength in storytelling itself.
Genres: american-civil-war, american-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, biographical-fiction, 21st-century, family-drama, american-history
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: unreliable-narrator
Setting: Antietam, Gettysburg, North Carolina
Period: Reconstruction, The Modern South
479 pages · Paperback · Faber
Content warnings: violence