How to Dodge a Cannonball
A Novel
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Notable Book of 2025
An NPR Books We Love pick
A New York Times Editors’ Choice pick
How to Dodge a Cannonball is a razor-sharp satire that dives into the heart of the Civil War, hilariously questioning the essence of the fight, not just for territory, but for the soul of America.
How to Dodge a Cannonball is funnier than the Civil War should ever be. It follows Anders, a teenage idealist who enlists and reenlists to shape the American Future—as soon as he figures out what that is, who it includes, and why everyone wants him to die for it. Escaping his violently insane mother is a bonus.
Anders finds honor as a proud Union flag twirler—until he’s captured. Then he tries life as a diehard Confederate—until fate asks him to die hard for the Confederacy at Gettysburg. Barely alive, Anders limps into a Black Union regiment in a stolen uniform. While visibly white, he claims to be an octoroon, and they claim to believe him. Only then does his life get truly strange.
His new brothers are even stranger, including a science-fiction playwright, a Haitian double agent, and a former slave feuding with God. Despite his best efforts, Anders starts seeing the war through their eyes, sparking ill-timed questions about who gets to be American or exploit the theater of war. Dennard Dayle’s satire spares no one as doomed charges, draft riots, gleeful arms dealers, and native suppression campaigns test everyone’s definition of loyalty.
Uproariously funny and revelatory, How to Dodge a Cannonball asks if America is worth fighting for. And then answers loudly. Read it while it’s still legal.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dayle (Everything Abridged: Stories) delivers a bracing Civil War satire focused on a young white volunteer's reversals of fortune. Anders, 15, joins the Union Army as a morale-boosting flag twirler, desperate to get away from his overbearing mother. He switches his allegiance after he's captured by Confederate soldiers ("No man deserved to lose his property, human or otherwise," Dayle wryly writes), then defects back to the Union side after barely surviving the Battle of Gettysburg. He joins an all-Black regiment by passing himself off as an octoroon, having taken on the identity of a fallen soldier, and makes friends with Tobias Gleason, a Black soldier who writes science fiction plays. The regiment moves on to New York, where Anders and Gleason help to quell the Draft Riots, and then Nevada, where they take part in a "standard Indian purge," which provokes them, and other Black soldiers, to desert and find sanctuary at the free city of San Valentin. An assault on San Valentin by Union general James McClellan leads to a final convulsive act of political theater. In Anders, Dayle has crafted an American Candide, whose naive beliefs are comically tested by his experiences with war and racism. This epic novel channels the absurdity of Catch-22 and the whimsical invention of The Intuitionist. It's a blast.
