Fallen Land
A Novel
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
An Indie Next pick and an Okra 2016 Winter Selection!
Fallen Land is Taylor Brown's debut novel set in the final year of the Civil War, as a young couple on horseback flees a dangerous band of marauders who seek a bounty reward. Callum, a seasoned horse thief at fifteen years old, came to America from his native Ireland as an orphan. Ava, her father and brother lost to the war, hides in her crumbling home until Callum determines to rescue her from the bands of hungry soldiers pillaging the land, leaving destruction in their wake. Ava and Callum have only each other in the world and their remarkable horse, Reiver, who carries them through the destruction that is the South. Pursued relentlessly by a murderous slave hunter, tracking dogs, and ruthless ex-partisan rangers, the couple race through a beautiful but ruined land, surviving on food they glean from abandoned farms and the occasional kindness of strangers. In the end, as they intersect with the scorching destruction of Sherman's March, the couple seek a safe haven where they can make a home and begin to rebuild their lives. Dramatic and thrillingly written with an uncanny eye for glimpses of beauty in a ravaged landscape, Fallen Land is a love story at its core, and an unusually assured first novel by award-winning young author Taylor Brown.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this evocative Civil War novel, 17-year-old Callum is riding with a Gray Ghost like Confederate colonel and his band of partisan rangers when they happen across a pregnant girl, Ava, who is Callum's age. After saving her from being raped, Callum is forced to go on the run with the girl, fleeing bounty hunters who mistakenly think that he was responsible for the Colonel (as he is known) being killed. The $5,000 bounty on Callum was posted by the Colonel himself in the event of his death, and everyone in his outfit is looking for a payday. Unable to shake the bounty hunters, Callum and Ava think that their best bet is Union-occupied Atlanta. Finding the city burned and with the bounty hunters hot on their trail, Callum and Ava make a desperate last ride east to reach the coast. Along the way, they come across victims of Sherman's scorched-earth policy, as well as those who take advantage of the chaos caused by war. This is a Civil War odyssey in the tradition of Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain and Daniel Woodrell's Woe to Live On, written in a vernacular that resurrects the era and fully brings alive Callum and Ava's adventures on the road. At the center of the story is the couple's growing love for each other, which powers the story to a suspenseful ending and a satisfying epilogue.
