Long Shadows

Tom Smiley signed up as a private in the Confederate army when he was eighteen and quickly came to regret it. Spending the last year of the war in a Union prison scarred him so deeply that even death hasn't brought freedom from its memory. A ghost in his deserted childhood home, he can’t forget the bloody war and its meaningless losses, or shed his revulsion for his role in the Confederate defense of slavery. But when a young couple moves in and makes his home their own in the early 21st century, trouble erupts—and Tom is forced to not only face his own terrible secret but also come to grips with his family’s hidden wartime history. He finds an unexpected ally in his house’s new owner, Phoebe Hunter, who is both fascinated and frightened by his ghostly presence—and whose discoveries will have momentous consequences for them both.


Genre: Historical

"What really haunts us--our own mistakes, or the weight of history? Based closely on the true story of her own uncanny encounters in an inherited antebellum Virginia farmhouse and old letters she found there, Abbie Cutter has crafted a novel that plumbs the painful history of a common soldier in the Civil War, and the burdens he cannot set down. A riveting read, rich in historic detail and moral complexity." - Geraldine Brooks

"Long Shadows is a richly imagined tragedy of a Rebel soldier whose regret for ill-chosen allegiance haunts him from the moment of enlistment through the horrors of a Union prison. It follows him into the afterlife, where he lingers in his ancestral home, unable to shed his shame for fighting for the cause of slavery. Masterful historical research and detail of the 19th century invest this story with a reader's pleasure in a felt life. All of this with an ear for the poetry that lives in disaster." - John Rolfe Gardiner

"A searing, brilliant, moving, and utterly original Civil War novel, told by the guilt-ravaged Virginia infantryman Tom Smiley whose own war never ended - at least not until a young couple move into his now-historic childhood home and start renovating, literally taking the past apart brick by brick, pots and pans, faded velvet curtains, cedar chests and china dishes and rusted hairpins, and even the tattered blue handkerchief box that contains his medals from the Battle of Gettysburg 25th and 50th reunions.....bringing it all back. A stirring meditation on guilt and redemption." - Lee Smith