Varina

Charles Frazier

Hachette, $29.99

From the author of Cold Mountain comes another Civil War-era novel, this one focusing on the fate and fortune of Varina Davis, the only first lady of the Confederate States of America. As a naïve teenager Varina married Jefferson Davis, a Mississippi landowner who turned to politics and became the President of the Confederate States after the outbreak of war. This well-crafted novel turns an elegiac lens on Varina's life. She's tracked down in extreme old age by a teacher who claims to be Limber Jimmy, the mixed-race boy she adopted as her own and was separated from decades before. Together, they remember and wrestle with the darkness of the past, seeking insight and answers as they plumb the fateful moments, and tragic forces, that impelled this complex (and by no means unsympathetic) woman to the forefront of the most destructive episode in American history.