Deserters
Regular price
€22.99
1864
A01=Jerry Gabriel
abandonment
adventure
army
Author_Jerry Gabriel
bounty
Brazil
brother
capture
Category=DS
Chicago
CivilWar
conspiracy
death
deserter
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
family
father
flight
forthcoming
history
hunger
immigrant
Ireland
Irish
Licoln
lost
Midwest
migration
Ohio
orphan
Pennsylvania
potatofamine
prison
pursuit
reelection
son
survival
theft
travel
Union
West
Product details
- ISBN 9781968209049
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 13 May 2026
- Publisher: Acre Books
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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An immersive adventure story set during the American Civil War follows four travelers as they escape toward the Western territories.
It is fall 1864, and Robert Riley has deserted his Army of the Potomac unit outside Petersburg, Virginia. Exhausted from years of war and worried about his motherless sons in Ohio, he returns to collect thirteen-year-old Michael and Sean, three years older, and flees to the Western territories. Along the way, he encounters Janey, an orphan at sixteen, who is also eager to go West. When Riley sees in her a quickness of mind, a brand of cunning that mirrors his own, he is persuaded to take her along.
Crossing the lower Midwest on horseback with little money and few possessions, the four are pursued by a wily private detective after the reward for turning in Riley. He manages to thwart the ragtag group, who abandon their plan of crossing the plains. They slip away by train to Chicago, and there, in that cold, stinking, dangerous metropolis, just before the 1864 election, they meet with problems beyond Riley’s ability to resolve. All four find themselves alone, at the mercy of fortune . . . and the fortune hunter, who finally gets the chance to face down his nemesis.
Deserters alternates between the perspectives of the four major characters as their relationships grow and shift, and as each of them strives to forge their way forward in the late war’s murky upheaval. A book whose antecedents include Charles Portis’s True Grit and Paulette Jiles’s News of the World, Gabriel’s immersive novel is an adventure story with psychological intricacy, emotional intensity, and historical heft.
It is fall 1864, and Robert Riley has deserted his Army of the Potomac unit outside Petersburg, Virginia. Exhausted from years of war and worried about his motherless sons in Ohio, he returns to collect thirteen-year-old Michael and Sean, three years older, and flees to the Western territories. Along the way, he encounters Janey, an orphan at sixteen, who is also eager to go West. When Riley sees in her a quickness of mind, a brand of cunning that mirrors his own, he is persuaded to take her along.
Crossing the lower Midwest on horseback with little money and few possessions, the four are pursued by a wily private detective after the reward for turning in Riley. He manages to thwart the ragtag group, who abandon their plan of crossing the plains. They slip away by train to Chicago, and there, in that cold, stinking, dangerous metropolis, just before the 1864 election, they meet with problems beyond Riley’s ability to resolve. All four find themselves alone, at the mercy of fortune . . . and the fortune hunter, who finally gets the chance to face down his nemesis.
Deserters alternates between the perspectives of the four major characters as their relationships grow and shift, and as each of them strives to forge their way forward in the late war’s murky upheaval. A book whose antecedents include Charles Portis’s True Grit and Paulette Jiles’s News of the World, Gabriel’s immersive novel is an adventure story with psychological intricacy, emotional intensity, and historical heft.
Jerry Gabriel is the author of two books of fiction, Drowned Boy and The Let Go. His first book, Drowned Boy, won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and the Towson Prize for Literature. He lives in Maryland with his wife and children, where he teaches writing at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.
