March

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and Richard and Judy pick. From the author of the acclaimed Year of Wonders and People of the Book a historical novel and love story set during a time of catastrophe on the front lines of the American Civil War. Set during the American Civil War March tells the story of John March known to us as the father away from his family of girls in Little Women Louisa May Alcotts classic American novel. In Brookss telling March emerges as an abolitionist and idealistic chaplain on the front lines of a war that tests his faith in himself and in the Union cause when he learns that his side too is capable of barbarism and racism. As he recovers from a near-fatal illness in a Washington hospital he must reassemble the shards of 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. As Alcott drew on her real-life sisters in shaping the characters of her little women so Brooks turned to the journals and letters of Bronson Alcott Louisa Mays father an idealistic educator animal rights exponent and abolitionist who was a friend and confidante of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The story spans the vibrant intellectual world of Concord and the sensuous antebellum South through to the first year of the Civil War as the North reels under a series of unexpected defeats. Like her bestselling Year of Wonders March follows an unconventional love story. It explores the passions between a man and a woman the tenderness of parent and child and the life-changing power
of an ardently held belief.