The American Civil War can hardly be said to be underexplored in fiction, from Gone with the Wind to Little Women to Cold Mountain. Until recently, however, novels featuring the backdrop have tended to focus on macho soldiers and the women they left behind.
The 29-year-old Texas-based author Nathan Harris was drawn to a fresh perspective on this subject matter in his debut novel as a way to understand the history of his own family: “All black writers are drawn to filling in their past,” he has said.
In Harris’s book, it is not just race that makes his characters’ lives precarious as the war ends. A passionate affair between two Confederate soldiers who were childhood friends must be kept secret as they return to Old Ox, the Georgia town they are both from. This is perhaps an echo of the gay couple fighting in the American Civil War in Sebastian Barry’s Costa Prize-winning novel Days Without End.
In The Sweetness of Water, last week longlisted for the Booker Prize, there are also two brothers, Landry and Prentiss, who have recently been freed from slavery and must work out what to do with their freedom.
