Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

An astonishing first novel about the Civil War and its aftermath in our own time, in the raucous voice of a woman who lived through it all.Lucy Marsden is the wife of the Civil War's last surviving soldier; she is now half-blind, 99 years old, locked into a charity home and very talkative. The darkly comic tale that Lucy tells straddles two centuries and forgives neither. Her ribald, blunt confession reveals two wars: one declared in 1861, the other gender-inspired, domestic and eternal. Here are Sherman's fires, the slaves' local pain and mythic imaginations, the mixed joys of motherhood and Lucy's own progress as the child bride of her crazed and earnest Civil War vet. Her tale-told epic offers a gallery of moral characters: aristocrats and sharecroppers, black and white, slave and free -- Lee and Lincoln among them. In her folk perspective, the South is a realm where fact and fable are both true.This is a joyously told, stubbornly ungrammatical last testament that offers a fond portrait of one plain woman's unending battle... one that is masterful and lasting.