"The pictures that Brooks paints of the war-ravaged South, particularly on the liberated plantation, are haunting. This richness, of time and place and of March’s unrelenting struggle to live up to the man he thinks he should be. makes March a spell-binder." --The Denver Post

"A beautifully wrought story about how war dashes ideals, unhinges moral certainties and drives a wedge of bitter experience and unspeakable memories between husband and wife." --Los Angeles Times Book Review

As the North reels under a series of un expected defeats during the dark first year of the Civil War. one man leaves behind his family to aid the Union cause, His experiences will utterly change his marriage and challenge his most ardently held beliefs. From Louisa May Alcott’s beloved classic Little Women. Geraldine Brooks has taken the character of the absent father. Mr. March. who has gone off to war, leaving his wife and daughters to make do in mean times. From vibrant New England to the sensuous antebellum South, March adds adult resonance to Alcott’s optimistic children’s novel. A lushly written, wholly original tale steeped in the details of another time, March secures Geraldine Brooks’s place as a renowned author of historical fiction.