Varina: A Novel

An Amazon Best Book of April 2018: The author of Cold Mountain returns to the American Civil War and imagines the life of Varina Howell, who married a Mississippi landowner with dreams of living a quiet, comfortable life. Fate had other plans, however, as her husband would later become the president of the Confederacy. Unlike Jefferson Davis, Howell had mixed feelings about the war and slavery, a struggle Frazier uses to explore the roots of racism. The novel is at once profound and propulsive, especially as it describes her flight from Richmond, children in tow, Union soldiers on their heels...But no sooner do you sympathize with Howell does she betray her own deep-seated prejudices, ones she will eventually question and try to atone for (to a certain degree). Varina is a fascinating portrait of a complicated woman--one that holds a mirror up to our own time and asks: Do you like what you see? --Erin Kodicek, Amazon Book Review