Blockbuster novel is centered around the McGavock cemetery.

Robert Hicks, author of Widow of the South

“The setting for Hicks’ novel is Carnton Plantation, home of the McGavock family. The house was used as a field hospital in the days and weeks after the battle, and though many other homes in the area were used for the same purpose, it was at Carnton that, as legend has it, at least four dead generals were laid out on the back porch during the battle itself, and where the discarded arms and legs of wounded soldiers made a pile that reached as high as a second floor window. More importantly, Carnton was the home of the legendary “Widow of the South.” Rather than let the original battlefield and its shallow graves be plowed over, Carrie and John McGavock donated two acres of land adjacent to their own family cemetery for the reburial of the nearly 1,500 Confederates’ remains. Until the day she died, Carrie McGavock tended to the cemetery, taking care to mark the graves, record the names of the dead, and give some closure to those left behind.”
The Nashville Scene

As Hicks writes, “Those men were the chains that bound the living. They were the missing whose absence shackled the survivors in place, people afraid to move on for fear of being gone for their sudden return. They drew the living back to the war, back to that battlefield over and over and over again, reenacting its rituals and its skirmishes until they all would be dead.”

Visit author Robert Hick’s official web site.