Escape from Andersonville: A Novel of the Civil War » (Bargain)

Two-time Academy Award–winning actor Gene Hackman is the coauthor of two previous novels, Justice for None and Wake of the Perdido Star, with Daniel Lenihan, a leading underwater archaeologist who writes frequently for Natural History magazine and is the author of Submerged. Hackman and Lenihan have been friends and neighbors for over a decade, and live with their families in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

An explosive novel of the Civil War about one man’s escape from a notorious Confederate prison camp—-and his dramatic return to save his men.

July 1864. Union officer Nathan Parker has been imprisoned at nightmarish Andersonville prison camp in Georgia along with his soldiers. As others die around them, Nathan and his men hatch a daring plan to allow him to escape through a tunnel and make his way to Vicksburg, where he intends to alert his superiors to the imprisonment and push for military action. His efforts are blocked by higher-ups in the military, so Parker takes matters into his own hands. Together with a shady, dangerous ex-soldier and smuggler named Marcel Lafarge and a fascinating collection of cutthroats, soldiers, and castoffs, a desperate Parker organizes a private rescue mission to free his men before it’s too late.

Exciting, thoroughly researched, and dramatic, Escape from Andersonville is a Civil War novel filled with action, memorable characters, and vividly realized descriptions of the war’s final year.

Publishers Weekly

For their third collaboration, two-time Academy Award-winner Hackman and Lenihan (Justice for None) competently mine Civil War lore to dramatize a prison escape. Southwest Georgia's Andersonville, aka Fort Sumter, was as bad a Confederate POW stockade as the gut-wrenching descriptions here ("an Old Testament nightmare") attest. Union Capt. Nathan Parker, commanding the Michigan 5th (aka Parker's Rangers, famed as a mounted infantry unit), is captured along with 23 of his men outside Washington, D.C., during Jubal Early's July 1864 Confederate raid. Two months later, Nathan breaks out, vowing to return and save his soldiers. Between the violent clashes undertaken with his hired guns, Nathan copes by reciting Thoreau and fondly recalling his lover, Darien Crosby. He presses his noble if not reckless mission despite his raiders' slippery loyalties, and the result is a rousing take on familiar territory. (May)

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