I write on the lap desk that you and the girls so thoughtfully provided me, and though I spilled my store of ink you need not trouble to send more, as one of the men has shown me an ingenious receipt for a serviceable substitute made from the seasonís last blackberries. (I hope my dear young author is finding time amid all her many good works to make some use of my little den, and that her friendly rats will not grudge a short absence from her accustomed aerie.) And yet to sit here under the shelter of a great tree as the men make their cook fires and banter together provides a measure of peace. Forgive my unlovely script, for an army on the march provides no tranquil place for reflection and correspondence. My hand, which I note is flecked with traces of dried phlegm, has the tremor of exhaustion. The line I have set down is, perhaps, on the florid side of fine, but no matter: she is a gentle critic. I pause there to mop my aching eye, which will not stop tearing. A dipping sun gilded and brazed each raveling edge as if the firmament were threaded through with precious filaments. This is what I write to her: The clouds tonight embossed the sky. A lushly written, wholly original tale steeped in the details of another time, March secures Geraldine Brookss place as an internationally renowned author of historical fiction. Spanning the vibrant intellectual world of Concord and the sensuous antebellum South, March adds adult resonance to Alcotts optimistic childrens tale to portray the moral complexity of war, and a marriage tested by the demands of extreme idealismand by a dangerous and illicit attraction. As he recovers from a near mortal illness, he must reassemble his shattered mind and body and find a way to reconnect with a wife and daughters who have no idea of the ordeals he has been through.

In her telling, March emerges as an idealistic chaplain in the little known backwaters of a war that will test his faith in himself and in the Union cause as he learns that his side, too, is capable of acts of barbarism and racism. To evoke him, Brooks turned to the journals and letters of Bronson Alcott, Louisa Mays fathera friend and confidant of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

Riveting and elegant as it is meticulously researched, March is an extraordinary novel woven out of the lore of American history.įrom Louisa May Alcotts beloved classic Little Women, Geraldine Brooks has taken the character of the absent father, March, who has gone off to war, leaving his wife and daughters to make do in mean times.

His experiences will utterly change his marriage and challenge his most ardently held beliefs. ( As the North reels under a series of unexpected defeats during the dark first year of the war, one man leaves behind his family to aid the Union cause. Winner of 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

March by geraldine brooks