Book
Simon the Fiddler
First published 2020
In March 1865, twenty-three-year-old Simon Boudlin is finally conscripted into the Confederate army after years of avoiding military service. His talent as a fiddler helps him survive the last fighting in Texas and brings him into a travelling band of former soldiers. At a military gathering in Galveston, he meets Doris Dillon, an Irish indentured servant attached to a Union officer’s household.
Simon follows a precarious route through a state governed by occupation forces, local feuds and uncertain law, earning money through music while trying to buy land and reach Doris again. Their courtship is constrained by class, contract and violence. The novel presents artistic vocation and domestic ambition as difficult forms of survival during the disorder that followed the Civil War.
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