From the bestselling author of White Slaves: 15 Years a Barbary Slave, An Absolute Secret, Shipwrecked Lives, Remembrance Man, and Playing Rudolf Hess comes this brilliantly imagined novel about a great American patriot: Lt. Bennett H. Young. Spanning Civil War prisons, Canadian courtrooms, blockade runners, hospital wards, and Jim Crow violence, Kentucky Choirboy is a powerful novel about survival, moral reckoning, and the long shadow of history. Meticulously researched and vividly imagined, it brings to life a turbulent era while asking enduring questions about loyalty, race, and what justice truly demands.
Kentucky Choirboy is a sweeping work of historical fiction inspired by the true story of Confederate raider Bennett H. Young and the forgotten international crisis that followed America’s Civil War. In 1864, after a daring escape from the brutal Camp Douglas prison in Chicago, Young leads a band of Confederate soldiers on a brazen raid across the Canadian border into St. Albans, Vermont—the northernmost action of the Civil War. Charged with robbery, arson, and murder, fourteen men are put on trial in Montreal, where a controversial ruling ignites diplomatic outrage and a frantic manhunt across Quebec. As Young flees through a frozen landscape with his lover Eliza, he is stalked by a relentless killer and saved by a ten- year-old wild girl called Iris—an encounter that will bind their lives for decades.
As the years unfold, the novel widens into a richly textured portrait of postwar North America. Iris grows into one of the first professionally trained nurses in the United States, confronting epidemic disease, battlefield trauma, and a devastating yellow fever outbreak in Kentucky.
Young, haunted by war and shaped by loss, pursues an unlikely path toward justice—culminating in a courtroom battle against the Ku Klux Klan on behalf of a Black farmer whose family has been driven from their land.