March.” So, March returns to his wife and daughters, and though he is tormented by the past and worried for his country’s future, the present, at least, is certain: he is home, he is a father again, and for now, that will be enough. “None of us is without sin,” she tells him. He turns to Grace, whom he has encountered once again, for guidance. And when it is time for him to leave he finds he does not want to return home. Though rescued and delivered to a Washington hospital where his physical health improves, March is a broken man, haunted by all he has witnessed and “a conscience ablaze with guilt” over the many people he feels he has failed. However, March’s sojourn there is brief and he finds himself reassigned to set up a school on one of the liberated plantations, Oak Landing-a disastrous posting that leaves him all but dead. Now, he finds himself back at the Clement estate, and what was once the most beautiful place he had ever seen has been transformed by the ugliness of war. She was the woman who provided his first kiss and who changed the course of his life.

It was here, more than twenty years earlier, that he first met Grace, a beautiful, literate slave. He is directed to a makeshift hospital, an old estate he finds strangely familiar. But he had not expected he would begin a journey through hell on earth, where the lines between right and wrong, good and evil, were too often blurred.įor now, however, he has no choice but to press on. He knew, above all else, that fighting this war for the Union cause was right and just. When he first enlisted, March was an idealistic man. “I never promised I would write the truth,” he admits, if only to himself.

But when he sits down to write his daily missive to his beloved wife, Marmee, he does not talk of the death and destruction around him, but of clouds “emboss the sky,” his longing for home, and how he misses his four beautiful daughters.

March, an army chaplain, has just survived a brush with death as his unit crossed the Potomac and experienced the small but terrible battle of Ball’s Bluff. March, Brooks has created a conflicted and deeply sensitive man, a father who is struggling to reconcile duty to his fellow man with duty to his family against the backdrop of one of the most grim periods in American history. March, the absent father from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Now, Brooks turns her talents to exploring the devastation and moral complexities of the Civil War through her brilliantly imagined tale of Mr. With her critically acclaimed and bestselling novel Year of Wonders, Geraldine Brooks was praised for her passionate rendering and careful research in vividly imagining the effects of the bubonic plague on a small English village in the seventeenth century.

March by geraldine brooks