Wife on the front line of war
FRAZIER, author of Cold Mountain (which became an Oscarwinning film), is steeped in the minutiae of the American Civil War — the slaughter, despair and the enduring retribution.
Varina was the wife of Jefferson Davis, the only president of the US Confederacy, and her long life encompassed the death of six children; drug addiction; exile after the South was defeated; and estrangement from her husband.
Unusually, she was educated, anti-slavery and, as a widow, earned a living from writing.
‘Being on the wrong side of history carries consequences,’ she says and, in a narrative that switches around in time, a fictional portrait of a complex woman emerges.
Gone With The Wind it is not — but it is a visceral, powerfully written evocation both of the beaten South at the nadir and of one of its more unusual survivors.
DARK WATER by Elizabeth Lowry (Riverrun €23.70)
‘I BEGAN to suspect that what we call madness... was a very proper terror at the soiled and intractable nature of the world.’ So concludes Hiram Carver, a psychiatrist at the pioneering Asylum for the Insane in Boston, Massachusetts. Twenty years earlier, in 1833, he was a ship’s doctor when he met William Borden, a hero who piloted a boat to safety after a mutiny.
Now Borden, to whom Hiram is powerfully drawn, is a patient in the asylum. Can Hiram call up reason from the dark water of his mind?
This beautifully written, ambitious exploration of human motivation, lies, violence and the will to survive is terrific. Exciting, spiked with high gothic and clever characterisation, it chips away at our notions of insanity.
THE GHOST TREE by Barbara Erskine (HarperCollins €18.20)
BARBARA ERSKINE’S bestselling first novel Lady Of Hay made her the acknowledged queen of the historical timeslip novel. The Ghost Tree proves that more than three decades on she is not yielding her crown. Sorting out her estranged, dead father’s house in Edinburgh, Ruth is confronted by a stranger who says he is her father’s son with a claim on the estate.
Then she discovers 18thcentury papers belonging to her ancestor, Thomas Erskine.
The youngest son of an impoverished noble family, incredibly, he became Lord Chancellor. But Ruth also learns that Thomas’s enemy, who vowed revenge on him and his descendants is, to her horror, edging into her life.
The inspiration for the story is Barbara Erskine’s own great-grandfather.