Related Websites

Welcome to Geraldine Brooks Website
Welcome to the Amos Bronson Alcott Network
The Web of American Transcendentalism
PBS: People and Events: John Brown
Plea for Captain John Brown
The Battle of Ball's Bluff

Related Reading

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Mr. March, the protagonist of Brooks’s novel, is taken from Alcott’s work.

Books by Geraldine Brooks

Nonfiction:
Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women
Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal’s Journey from Down Under to All Over

Fiction:
Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague

Military Historical Fiction Set in the Civil War Era

The Classic:

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

Military Fiction:

The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
Shaara’s highly-acclaimed novel about the Battle of Gettysburg won the Pulitzer Prize. Shaara’s son, writer Jeff Shaara, completed the Civil War cycle by writing Gods and Generals, a prequel to The Killer Angels, and The Last Full Measure.

Nathaniel Starbuck Chronicles by Bernard Cornwell
A series of novels whose protagonist is Confederate Captain Nathaniel Starbuck. Starbuck, the son of Boston abolitionists, is in Virginia when the war breaks out in 1861 and joins the rebel cause.

The Battle of Milroy Station by Robert Fowler

No Greater Courage: A Novel about the Battle of Fredericksburg by Richard Croker

Authors James L. Nelson and David Poyer have written novels about the Civil War at sea.

Additional Historical Fiction Set in the Civil War Era

Sons of Liberty by Marie Jakober

On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon by Kaye Gibbons

Enemy Women by Paulette Jiles

Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks
A novel about John Brown.

The Widow of the South by Robert Hicks

White Doves at Morning by James Lee Burke

Paradise Alley by Kevin Baker
The New York City draft riots are the central event of this novel.

Mystery series by Owen Parry
Owen Parry has written an excellent mystery series starring Captain Abel Jones, a Welshman, veteran of the British army during the bloody Indian mutiny. Jones immigrates to America and joins the Union Army. In Faded Coat of Blue, the first book in the series, Jones is asked by General McClellan to investigate the murder of an abolitionist. In later books Jones does investigative work for President Lincoln.

Compiled by Suzanne Fisher (fishers@uhls.lib.ny.us)