Author(s): Robert Hicks

Fiction

Based on a true story set during the American Civil War, Widow of the South focuses on Zachariah Cashwell, a young but seasoned soldier in the Confederate army; and Carrie McGavock, a married woman who's buried three of her five children and has had her family plantation requisitioned by the Confederate army to be used as a field hospital. Carrie notices Cashwell from all the thousands of other men bleeding and dying around her, and recognises something in him - a willingness to die - which she herself has been consumed by since the deaths of her children. It is the power of their unrequited love that drives the novel to its hugely emotional conclusion.